Legacy Survey of Space and Time Gets Closer
The Trump administration announced a major milestone for the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory with the installation of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera on the telescope. Next up is the final phase of testing before capturing "first look" images and then the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will begin.Large new astronomy has been banned in the continental US (and now Hawaii) due to environmental lawsuits for decades so this is on on Cerro Pachón in Chile. The LSST Camera, the largest ever built, was constructed at the federally-managed Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California. After completion last April, the team transported the 7,000 pound, 3,200-megapixel camera to Chile. For context, each image will be so large it needs 400 ultra-high-definition TV screens to display.
_Credit: NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory/B. Quint_ Now it has been set into position on the Simonyi Survey Telescope, where the Rubin Observatory's 8.4-meter combined primary/tertiary mirror and a 3.5-meter secondary mirror will allow scans of the southern sky for the next decade and create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the universe.
We'll get comets and asteroids and everything else that happens across the Southern Hemisphere.
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