World's Largest Digital Camera Project Passes Critical Milestone

An anonymous reader writes in with a link about the progress of one of the coolest astronomy projects around. "A 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera designed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is now one step closer to reality. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope camera, which will capture the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed, has received 'Critical Decision 1' approval by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to move into the next stage of the project. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics."

Comments

Re:In LOC, please

[RenderSeven]

Most people think that 'petabytes' is somehow related to child pornography, 'exabytes' is a skin disease, and 'zettabytes' is a video game character.

Re:Sad for NASA

[Jeng]

It is politically beneficial it for politicians to cut NASA's funding, but other agencies want these projects done so they do it because they actually have the funding to do it.

So yea, it is sad for NASA, but it's not NASA's fault.

All those pixels...

[Reasonable Facsimile]

... just waiting to be dumbed-down with an instagram filter.

Re:Spotting Solar system object

[Jeng]

The problem is that even with this camera, if what you are looking at is not illuminated then it will not be visible (think asteroid in shadow of moon).

So basically the worlds largest digital camera needs the worlds largest camera flash. I would suggest using a low yield nuclear warhead, but there would be a few issues with that.