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3.2 gigapixel camera in the new SLAC telescope





The SLAC National Acceleration Laboratory received approval from the US Department of Energy for the construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) telescope, which, after being installed in the mountains of Chile, will give out photographs of the Universe of unprecedented quality.



A 6.5-year-old double mirror telescope manufacturing process was completed recently. In March 2008, 22 tons of high-quality Japanese glass were melted in a furnace, poured into a mold and cooled for three months, and grinding has continued since then. Now the glass was transported to the aircraft hangar at Tucson Airport. For several years, it will be carefully applied a reflective coating. The M1M3 mirror will complement the optical system of a giant telescope digital camera .





Before the start of melting

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A new telescope will be installed in the Inter-American Astronomical Observatory of Cerro Tololo, 80 km east of the city of La Serena and 100 km south of the La Silla Observatory.



Over the ten years of operation, a new 3.2-megapixel telescope must capture tens of billions of objects (they say for the first time some telescope can take pictures of more stars than people live on Earth). It is planned to record videos of the motion of the universe with extremely high detail.







LSST will generate approximately 6 petabytes (6 * 10 15 bytes) of information per year. Detailed images of the southern hemisphere will allow astrophysicists to study the formation of galaxies, track potentially dangerous asteroids, observe the explosions of stars and better understand what dark energy and dark matter are, which are still virtually unexplored (therefore, they are called “dark”), although they are make up 95% of the mass of the universe.



The project budget for a digital camera has recently been approved by the Department of Energy (the construction of the main telescope structure is funded by the National Science Foundation), so the construction of a telescope can be called a practically solved business. The two organizations mentioned will allocate $ 168 million and $ 473 million, respectively.







Before the beginning of the actual construction of the chamber, there is still the third, final stage of project approval in the summer of 2015. The components of the camera - parts the size of a car weighing up to 3 tons - will be created in different parts of the world as part of a program of international cooperation between 40 universities and research laboratories that are included in the non-commercial consortium LSST Corporation.



If everything goes well, construction will begin shortly, and the telescope will be commissioned in 2022.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/375481/



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