world’s largest Digital cameras are getting a lot of attention. A very powerful personal camera may have a megapixel resolution, but an astronomer he built a device that captures the distant universe at 3.2 pixels. Gigapixel resolution. (A gigapixel equals 1,000 megapixels.)
This camera will be the workhorse of the telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This telescope has been in the works for about 20 years and is almost complete. At the end of September, scientists and engineers working in a giant clean room at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., finished assembling the mechanical components of a sensitive camera and are now in final testing before installation. progressing.
Aaron Ludman, SLAC astrophysicist and associate director of the Rubin Observatory, said:He has his own oversized lens with both his 5.5 foot lens and focal plane that comes with his cap Guinness World Records Because of its unusual size.
Engineers will test the camera in about two months, and in May the team will deploy the camera on a chartered plane to the telescope’s site in the desert mountains of northern Chile. Scientists are aiming to conduct the telescope’s first imaging test in late 2023, with Rubin’s official debut in March 2024, dubbed “first light.”
At this point, the telescope will begin collecting 20 terabytes of data each night for 10 years. This allows scientists to create a vast map of the sky as seen from the Southern Hemisphere. This includes his 20 billion galaxies and his 17 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This is a good portion of all the galaxies in the universe and all the stars in our own galaxy. Rodman says. It also collects images of his 6 million asteroids and other objects in our solar system. Such a huge space database would have been inconceivable until recently.
This is the opposite of the approach used by the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, which zooms in to capture spectacular images of narrow slices of the sky. Instead, Rubin will repeatedly scan the entire southern sky (about 18,000 square degrees), collecting data for all visible objects and imaging each region 825 times at different wavelengths of light. Rubin also charts more of the universe in depth than its predecessors, such as his survey and the Dark Energy Survey, in Sloan Digital Sky.
This fire hose of valuable data comes thanks to this new nearly 3-ton camera. Its image sensor consists of over 200 custom-designed charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that capture images with six filters covering the opto-electromagnetic spectrum from the violet to the infrared end.
The camera images parts of the sky every three days and can be used together to examine faint and distant objects, as well as to find changing objects such as supernova explosions and the orbits of near-Earth asteroids and comets. Provides snapshots that can be used for trajectory. Her Risa Wechsler, an astrophysicist at Stanford University and a member of the Rubin Observatory’s Scientific Advisory Board, said: “And then we’re stacking frames from that movie to get a very deep image. This gives us a map of all the galaxies, and we can track where all the matter is. This is mostly dark See what the universe looked like billions of years ago and learn more about what dark matter is.”
