Construction of the World's Largest Astronomy Camera Completed in April

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Bay Area scientists and engineers completed construction of the largest astronomy camera in the world last month, marking a major milestone in a decade-long project that will explore the very fabric of the universe when operations begin next year at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

The project will also yield data on our immediate solar system, shedding light on how it formed and helping track the paths of potentially hazardous asteroids.

Led by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in partnership with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), as well as other international universities and labs, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera (LSSTCam) will, in a few years, gather more data than all other telescopes in the world combined, as it seeks to better understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

Named for our inability to see them, dark energy and matter serve as placeholder terms for phenomena that would help explain our observations of the universe's expansion. Current calculations estimate that 68% of the universe is dark energy, 27% dark matter and only 5% the ordinary matter that we are familiar with, according to SLAC.

"When you look at statistics (and) the movement of cosmological objects, they are moving in some ways that make it look like there should be more mass than we visibly can see," said Vincent Riot, who managed the LSSTCam project at LLNL.

While the big bang theory expects the force of gravity to have gradually slowed the universe's initial expansion, the expansion instead accelerated about five billion years ago, according to NASA.

"What we see doesn't match what we infer from the equations of physics that we know," said Riot.

With a resolution of 3,200 megapixels, equivalent to about 1,500 high-definition televisions, LSSTCam will, over the next 10 years, capture as much of the southern night sky as continuously as possible. The project will detect about 20 billion galaxies, marking the first time that a telescope will observe more galaxies than people on Earth. With this trove of data, scientists hope to infer the behavior of dark energy and matter based on the movements of the objects we can see.

LLNL leveraged its expertise in large optics, gained through its development of the laser-based National Ignition Facility, in the design of LLNLCam's optical components.

Riot said that while many organizations were capable of specifying the designs of the camera's large optics, it was a different question as to whether they could actually build them.

"I think one of the things that Livermore really brought to this project from the optics standpoint is the knowledge of designing something that can be made and can be verified that you've actually made it," he said.

Optical filters made with nanometer-thick deposits needed to remain uniform across an eight-meter diameter for the camera's data to be usable.

"The success of the fabrication of this unique optical assembly is a testament to LLNL's world-leading expertise in large optics, built on decades of experience in the construction of the world's largest and most powerful laser systems," physicist Scot Olivier said previously. Olivier helped manage Livermore's involvement in the LSST project for more than a decade.

The camera will soon begin a journey to Chile that will end with a drive up an 8,900-foot peak on Cerro Pachón Ridge in the Andes, where it will be installed on the Simonyi Survey Telescope later this year.