07:24 GMT - Tuesday, 18 March, 2025

World’s largest digital camera to help new Vera Rubin Observatory make a ‘time-lapse record of the universe’ (video)

Home - Space & Technology - World’s largest digital camera to help new Vera Rubin Observatory make a ‘time-lapse record of the universe’ (video)

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Posted 10 hours ago by inuno.ai

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A major milestone with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has been reached with the installation of the telescope’s enormous LSST Camera — the last optical component required before the last phase of testing can begin.

The car-sized Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Camera that was recently installed on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the largest digital camera ever built and will be used to capture detailed images of the southern hemisphere sky over a decade.

“The installation of the LSST Camera on the telescope is a triumph of science and engineering,” said Harriet Kung, Acting Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science in a statement. “We look forward to seeing the unprecedented images this camera will produce.”

a massive black cylinder is lifted by crane into a round metal enclosure in a large warehouse

The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory team installing the LSST Camera on the Simonyi Survey Telescope in March 2025. (Image credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/B. Quint)

The telescope is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and is named after Dr. Vera C. Rubin, an American astronomer whose work provided strong evidence for the existence of dark matter. Along with her colleague Kent Ford, Rubin observed that in the numerous galaxies they studied, stars at the outer edges were moving just as fast as those near the center. This was unusual because, according to Newtonian physics and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, objects farther from the center of a gravitational system should orbit more slowly due to the weaker gravitational pull.

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