The World’s Largest Camera, 20 years in the making.

I went to SLAC to see the camera from the Simonyi LSST before it ships out to Chile with some astronaut friends who are keen to mine the torrent of data to find the asteroids that might impact Earth in the future. When it comes online in 2024, it will have two dedicated submarine fiber lines bringing the data feed back to SLAC.

With a 3.2 gixapixel CCD sensor array cooled to -100° C and a quick carbon fiber shutter, it captures an exceptional field of view in a single shot (equal to 7 full moons across). Each exposure is 15 seconds, and it takes 2 seconds to read out the data and mux it onto a fiber.

It will take a survey of 40 billion objects, a census of galaxies and their spatial distribution. We will see the weak gravitational lensing effect of dark matter. And we can track near earth objects and the asteroids’ trajectories back to their formation origin.

It has 200 4K*4K pixel sensors, costing $100k each (yes, a $20M imager in a $168M camera).

I was at SLAC 11 years ago as they were pitching this camera, and it is true to the original specs. Back then, the generation of 20TB/night was, well, astronomical. With the subsequent turns of Moore’s Law, that is already exceeded by the Planet Labs network of telescopes.