World's Biggest Digital Camera with 3.2 Billion-Pixel


 

Bangalore: The world’s biggest digital camera with 3.2 billion pixels designed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is now entering its engineering stage. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) camera will capture the widest, fastest and deepest view of night sky.

The LSST will survey the entire sky every week. The camera is capable of capturing an area which is 49 times the size of the moon in a single image. Its deep and frequent cosmic view will capture anything from near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and even the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

“With 189 sensors and over 3 tons of components that have to be packed into an extremely tight space, you can imagine this is a very complex instrument,” said Nadine Kurita, Project Manager for the LSST camera at SLAC. “But given the enormous challenges required to provide such a comprehensive view of the universe, it’s been an incredible opportunity to design something so unique.”

As of now the LSST camera has passed the Critical Decision 1 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to move into the next stage of the project and when finished it will give some amazing pictures of outer space.