World's Most Powerful Digital Camera Sees Construction Green Light

An anonymous reader writes: The Department of Energy has approved the construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telecscope's 3.2-gigapixel digital camera, which will be the most advanced in the world. When complete the camera will weigh more than three tons and take such high resolution pictures that it would take 1,500 high-definition televisions to display one of them. According to SLAC: "Starting in 2022, LSST will take digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights from atop a mountain called Cerro Pachón in Chile. It will produce a wide, deep and fast survey of the night sky, cataloging by far the largest number of stars and galaxies ever observed. During a 10-year time frame, LSST will detect tens of billions of objects—the first time a telescope will observe more galaxies than there are people on Earth – and will create movies of the sky with unprecedented details. Funding for the camera comes from the DOE, while financial support for the telescope and site facilities, the data management system, and the education and public outreach infrastructure of LSST comes primarily from the National Science Foundation (NSF)."

Comments

What does the DoE get out of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange.

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps a test for a future spy satellite.

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, since it will be observing a similar area many times and trying to build a kind of time series, the DOE might be interested in the processing techniques used to orient and identify objects and detect change over time.

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[Nutria]

But that still doesn't answer the question of what the Department of Energy gets out of such a camera.

Re: What does the DoE get out of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tarting in 2022" (sic)

I will leave it to your imagination!

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

I came here to ask the same question...

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Department of Energy is the successor of the Manhattan project and is responsible for funding much of the United State's fundamental research in physics. Most particle physics research (Higgs boson), nuclear research (including fundamental research into how neutron stars explode as supernovae), and dark matter research is funded by the DoE. The DoE is building this camera because it will make precision measurements of Dark Energy by seeing how our universe has grown with time.

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

They claim that they will learn about dark energy and perhaps harness it.

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[Applehu Akbar]

I can see a major use being patrol searches for possible Earth-colliding objects. Think of it as a follow-on to LONEOS.

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[cdrudge]

It's not so much what the DoE "gets" out of it as the LSST is being ran by Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) as part of the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory, which is ran by the DoE. All of the national laboratories are ran under the DoE and do a lot more basic science research than just figuring out how to make nuclear reactions and seeing how fast they can smash particles together.

From the bottom of the article:

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. ...
The DOE-funded effort to build the LSST camera is managed by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC). Learn more at lsst.org.â ...
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Re: What does the DoE get out of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it gets -7 year old easy women?

Re:What does the DoE get out of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to pick nits, its not "Stanford Linear Accelerator Center" anymore. There was a big dispute between Stanford and the DoE about the use of the name "Stanford" which resulted in a name change to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. People realized that "SLAC" was such a well known name they just couldn't drop it. But know it is no longer an acronym like it used to be.

Uranus jokes

[turkeydance]

paris/france all that

What is this construction green light?

[Anonymous Coward]

that the headline claims the camera can see? I've been into astronomy my entire life and have a physics degree, but I've never heard that term.

Re:What is this construction green light?

[Anonymous Coward]

They pointed it down at a street miles below, where there was a green traffic light spotted in a construction zone?

Re: What is this construction green light?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pull your head out of the books. Green light means to begin

Re:What is this construction green light?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you never worked with the Big Boys.
Starting with Lawrence and his Cyclotron, Accelerator Operations got very complicated very quickly, and Chains made their appearance.
These can be Equipment Chains or Safety Chains. The status of the Chains was displayed on Horizontal strings of lights in panels, until Computers and such nonsense as SCADA mucked things up.
There were several Standards: 12V, 24V, and 48V Telephone Lamps were commonly used, AC or DC, the Lamps didn't much care. Each Lamp was driven by a relay, and covered with a colored cap. (This was in parallel with the Development of Traffic Lights instead of Traffic Semaphores, and the increasing complexity of such things as Submarines and Nuclear Power plants.)
Equipment Chains were series based; this water flowswitch must make up before some Screen Voltage can be applied- that sort of thing.
Safety Chains were generally more thoroughly thought out, with Redundancies, and involved a lot of hand-wired Boolean Logic. This Door must be closed, and that Door must be closed, or this Plug must be inserted and the RF must be off, ... this can go on for paragraphs.

Green lights were used to indicate that Equipment was ready and the System is Off. Red was used for Activated Equipment and "System On".
Orange lights were used to indicate interesting, but not critical, information.
After this had come to Maturity, and the Lamps would reliably light for ~20K hours, the LED came along. Red, Green and Amber LEDs. (Blue was rarely used for interesting reasons not mentioned here.) Much jiggering of circuitry was involved because LEDs care very much about such things as Voltage and Polarity.

To say that something has a "Green Light" is commonly assumed to have the Traffic Light meaning: Green says "Go".
But in Physics, and in the Military, and in Industry, to say the something has the "Green Light" has a specific meaning: Prerequisite Conditions have been met, and that is all. One may or may not push The Big Red Button.

And now you know why Red, Green, and Amber LEDs became a Standard. But not Blue. Why not Blue? Another time, another time...

Distance?

[Dan East]

World's Most Powerful Digital Camera Sees Construction Green Light

Yes, but how far away is the green light? If it's only a few feet away then the fact that the camera can see it really isn't such a big deal.

Re:Distance?

[bob_super]

Seeing its own construction light would make that the world's biggest selfie. XXIst century priorities, you see...

Re:Distance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I literally was wondering how far away this light was that it could see... or something. It took reading the article... Going huh?... Reading the headline... Reading the article... Reading the headline, then finally it clicked "Oh! The most powerful digital camera was given the green light to be constructed."

One of the most confusing headlines I have seen.

Re:Distance?

[Wraithlyn]

"he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away"

Re:Distance?

[SQL Error]

But it can see its own light even before it's built.

That's pretty impressive.

Re:Distance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to point out that this is in reference to Navigation Lights- "Red Right Returning" and all that.
But Nick Carraway would have known that.

Re:Distance?

[arglebargle_xiv]

Seeing its own construction light would make that the world's biggest selfie. XXIst century priorities, you see...

Speaking of selfies, by the time this is completed in 2027 (planned time + overruns), you'll be able to get the same resolution on the iPhone 23. It's like using computers for code-breaking, the best way to break crypto that takes ten years to attack is to wait 9 1/2 years and then do it in six months on the computer you can get then. The best way to get this camera is to wait until a year before it's due to be comissioned, then buy the sensors that'll be available then. Oh, and in the meantime you can be collecting interest on the money you're not spending.

Re:Distance?

[tonique]

Green light from Hanny's Voorwerp is quite far away, so they could aim for that.

Re: Distance?

[SozeebIslam]

By hearing i am so much astonished.

Re:Distance?

[GNious]

Since it hasn't been built yet, seeing the light that triggers its own construction means that the camera is indeed far away - a few lightyears from Earth, at least.

Re:Distance?

[the phantom]

I don't know about that. A couple of back-of-the-envelope computations make me think that 10 years is not a long enough timeframe to make such a camera anywhere near common. Consider, for instance, the 3 ton weight. Suppose that technology develops such that an equivalent sensor halves in weight every year. Ten years then represents halving the weight 10 times, giving a weight of approximately 6 lbs. That definitely isn't iPhone weight, and comes from a pretty optimistic assumption about how quickly the technology will develop. The computation, for completeness: (3 tons) / 2^10) ~= 5.9 lbs

Or we could look at pixel counts. The summary claims that the camera will capture 3.2 gigapixel images. Apple claims that the iPhone 6 has a 8 mega pixel camera. So the telescope camera will capture 400 times as much data. Assuming that the iPhone camera doubles its pixel count every year, it would take almost 9 years to get to 3.2 gigapixels. Even if we assume that the iPhone is used to take panoramas, where a panorama can have up to about 2^3 the pixel count of a non-panorama (again, see Apple's claims), this represents 6 years of doubling every year, which is, again, pretty optimistic.

Long story short: yes, technology marches forward, but this is likely to be a pretty impressive instrument even 10-15 years in the future.

Re:Distance?

[jbmartin6]

Funny and true, I just spent a few seconds trying to figure out what sort of astronomical phenomenon was called 'construction green light' and how being up on a mountain would make it easier to view. I thought it had something to do with the green flashes.

Re:Distance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work on the design of the sensors which are one of the candidates for the LSST instrument. The camera uses "raft" modules, each of which contains 9 large CCD chips (yes, CCD, not CMOS imagers as are found in all mobile phone cameras, they don't satisfy the requirements on linearity, fill factor, quantum efficiency or dynamic range). There are many, many such modules in the camera focal plane. I believe the total number of CCDs in the FP is about 130. Each pixel is 10 micron square, about 10 times that of a typical phone camera (and they may be smaller by then!).
The active silicon is also about 100 micron thick, around 100 times the active thickness of a phone camera. You need this for the quantum efficiency (catching all the photons), especially in the red end of the spectrum. There is a back bias of approx 100V across the depletion region of the sensor to reduce charge diffusion during collection. The resistivity of the substrate is ~3000ohm-cm (about 1000 times your usual phone camera) And the whole thing is backside thinned, which is an incredibly difficult and complex process to do on chips of this kind of thickness. The chip packaging is custom, built of a special type of silicon carbide, so the thermal expansivities can be matched precisely. The readout noise of the output amplifier is something like 4 electrons (your phone CMOS is about 30).

It is all cooled to roughly -120 degree (celsius), to keep the dark current down, something which you don't care about on your phone camera, because exposures are in the order of milliseconds not tens or hundreds of seconds.

Imaging sensors, like many other areas of specialist components, are items to which Moore's law and similar in general doesn't apply. Yes, the camera in your phone/point and shoot is getting better at an astonishing rate using CMOS sensors, but in scientific imaging there are always going to be specific requirements that you don't need or want in consumer devices, even the iPhone 23 or whatever, which is why scientific instruments such as this will always be expensive. Nobody will need millions of these chips, we will need a couple of hundred ever. There is far more to camera sensors than pixel count.
If you wait until 6 months before and buy the best phone camera chips available at that time, it may well have a gigapixel array (doubtful but who can guess?), but it certainly won't satisfy any of the other ~100 requirements that are placed on LSSTs detectors to meet the science goals.

I wonder if it will be powerful enough

[Anonymous Coward]

to find these mysterious creatures called editors. I hear rumor they exist somewhere in the universe but I see no sign of them here.

According to SLAC: "tarting in 2022, LSST

Re:I wonder if it will be powerful enough

[ganjadude]

no, see its sweet now, but in 2022 it will become tart.

Persistent Surveillance Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

DOE? If you thought that Persistent Surveillance Systems (http://www.pss-1.com/#!sensors/ca4p) were a good idea, you'd fund a gigapixel near-IR wide angle camera. Perhaps the claimed weight and astronomical use of this camera just a distraction from its more commercial and everday purpose?

that sounds pretty sweet;

[Anonymous Coward]

i just hope they never launch one into orbit, pointed down.

And in 50 years

[CanadianMacFan]

We'll all be walking around with one in our smartphones.

Re:And in 50 years

[rwise2112]

We'll all be walking around with one in our smartphones.

A 3 ton camera? I doubt it...

Lots more information

[Michael Woodhams]

here. (Warning: 50 page graphics intensive PDF.)
Optical path on page 26. 6Gb of raw data every 17 seconds (page 32).

Re:Lots more information

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, how will they store all the data? imagine even having to catalog it especially since only a tiny amount of the total data will be useful.

Re:Lots more information

[thegarbz]

Should be quite simple compared to the LHC's data output.

Re:Lots more information

[edremy]

It's not. It's actually one of the biggest problems the LSST will have for a couple of reasons

1) It's not in the middle of Europe, it's on a remote mountain in Chile. A bit harder to get super high speed internet up there

2) The data off the LHC can mostly be analyzed by computer. While some of the LSST data can be (transient stuff), discovery of interesting new things is going to be a lot harder to automate, so trying to figure out how to get people to actually look at the torrent of info coming off of it will be a challenge.

That said, they aren't very worried about the actual data itself- they are starting with a 150TFLOP computer to do the initial analysis and figure they will need about 950TFLOP after a decade of use, which is fast but not world record setting. ~60PB of info over a decade is doable with a variety of tech

Re:Lots more information

[kaiser423]

To be fair, with respect to #1, that was an issue with the EVLA in the Atacama desert. It makes me chuckle to think about how seriously wired up that super remote chunk of the desert is getting.

Re:Lots more information

[bob_super]

Read again: 6Gb every 17 seconds (reading a big sensor is slow work)
That's 353Mb/s, which neatly fits in a Gig-E pipe and can be recorded by the puniest 5" HDD out there.
To sustain that rate for the whole night (10 hours or 36ks), you need about 12.7Tb of storage... a 3TB drive will do with room to spare.
Build a good size RAID, put tape backup (you have the whole day), not exactly a challenge.

(FYI, the LHC is many orders of magnitude higher: http://home.web.cern.ch/about/...)

Re:Lots more information

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should read again yourself? http://www.lsst.org/about/dm
According to their own website, the LSST will produce 15TB of data each night. So your back of the envelope calculation to fit on a 3TB disk is wrong. Yes, the amount of raw data is not as large as for the LHC, but that really is an apples to oranges comparison. The LHC data is heavily reduced by multiple levels of triggers. It would be impossible to read out everything. The data that is finally analysed has gone through many, many steps of background event reduction. The LSST on the other hand captures images. The analysis requires those images. So the challange is not so much storing the data, but being able to do analysis on that data set.

Re:Lots more information

[bob_super]

Just went by the OP's numbers.
Even 15TB per night is a laughable amount, when you remember it's at best 6 years away. That will probably be one drive per night by then...

Re: Lots more information

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get it, do you? Its not the amount of data that is the challenge. It is the analysis of said data. I guess you're one of those thinking it will be a bunch of image files and we're done. Guess what, wrong! Just read some of the papers on the subject!

Re: Lots more information

[bob_super]

I may not get "it", but I know how to read the original thread question (AC @05:08PM): "hmm, how will they store all the data?"

Oh, and I do get your point too. Massive image processing acceleration via FPGAs might be somewhat related to my day job.

Re: Lots more information

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, it is not the amount of data that poses a challenge but how you store it to make it accessible for many, many different analysis scenarios. Just putting it on a RAID array is not a solution. The data must be indexed and so on. But hey, since you're such an expert here, why don't you go tell the science team that they are doing it wrong and make your case. I guess when you see the actual specs and what needs to be available to the scientist, you'll go "oh ok, I didn't think about that!".

Re: Lots more information

[bob_super]

You see, you take your truck full of tapes down your mountain, past the desert and into the city, then you drive into a weird place called a datacenter, and upload the whole thing into a system designed for high availability, duplication, indexing/processing, and resilience. You can't have the datacenter near the telescope for many reasons, but you can save the truck trip by laying a bunch of optical fibers alongside your electrical mains, if the distance and the budget allows. If you don't know much about optimal datacenter architecture, many companies with lots and lots of experience will be glad to teach you or do it for you.
If you then access that datacenter remotely, you may even consider that connection to be magical and call it a "cloud", though most earth-based telescope operators are not huge fans of the term.

That's one way to answer the question "how do you store all the data".
Glad to be of help.

Not the biggest, nor the best resolution.

[quenda]

Is the phrase "World's Most Powerful Digital Camera" carefully chosen to exclude the much larger cameras just above this world?
(All, except one, looking down at us)

Re:Not the biggest, nor the best resolution.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is actually the biggest, by far. Even if a spy agency got something of this size in space there is no way they could get the data down.

Re:Not the biggest, nor the best resolution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the phrase "World's Most Powerful Digital Camera" carefully chosen to exclude the much larger cameras just above this world?
(All, except one, looking down at us)

No, you're merely an ignorant idiot. This has much larger resolution than those by far.

Need two.

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a similar one for the Northern Sky.

Re:Need two.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, at the best Latitudes for Northern viewing, there are those pesky things called People, and their nasty Light Pollution.
Try sailing due West from SF or LA at night. It isn't until you get about 200 miles out before the Eastern Glow goes away.
Also, although this may appear odd to most of us, the Southern Skies are much more interesting for Astronomers.

Gigapixels?

[MouseR]

How big is that in football fields?

Re:Gigapixels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang! You beat me to the punch (line)!

My Coolpix is better

[Anonymous Coward]

My digital camera has an Auto-Focus, i bet this fancy camera wont even have that, probably needs teams of people to focus it.
It has an Easy-Mode that can be used in conjuction with Auto-Focus !
My camera is shock proof, even an earthquake wont stop my camera, bet they cant say that.

Re:My Coolpix is better

[Anonymous Coward]

but this one takes better pics for 3d porn... imagine the detail!

1500 HD TVs, how many other devices

[Anonymous Coward]

1500 HD TVs
400 4k devices
100 8k devices (commercial panels should hit about 2018)

So given it'll be close to a decade before any images probably come in, your local shopping mall or best buy will probably have a video wall almost big enough.

Re:1500 HD TVs, how many other devices

[omnichad]

I was going to say, HD TV's aren't a high enough resolution unless you're just trying for a big number. Why didn't they just go for 10,100 SD TV's?

Deep, wide, fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do is getting into porn?

I wonder if they point it at the moon

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they point it at the moon, we might be able to see the "landing sites" from a source that is not NASA.

By 2022

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be surprised if our cell phones couldn't take 1 gigapixel photos.

Re:By 2022

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that this may be technically possible, but _all_ cell phone cameras are currently Diffraction Limited due to the small Lenses.
One Gigapixels of Mush looks pretty much like one Megapixels of Mush. It's just three orders of Magnitude more Mush.

Honest question: why?

[areusche]

What's the point of a gigapixel camera if there aren't resolutions high enough to display it? My knowledge of printing is fuzzy too but wouldn't you need a crazy printer to also print this type of image?

Re:Honest question: why?

[omnichad]

So you can crop it. A lot.

Re:Honest question: why?

[robi5]

You can zoom and crop like this and your prints will still be fine.

Re:Honest question: why?

[thegarbz]

It's not about displaying. It's about analysing the results.

Ten years from now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Our phones are going to put it to shame.

part of the image at a time. One pic b/c free $bil

[raymorris]

I imagine they'll look at, or process, a small part of the image at a time. If you eyes can only see a few megapixels at a time, and your GPU can only analyze a few megapixels at a time, "why not just take a thousand images of 10 megapixels each?" you might ask. Because the tax payers won't give you a half billion dollars if you do that. When the government is ready to hand you half a billion dollars, why not go ahead and have bragging rights to the highest resolution in a single image? At least until the iphone 9 comes out, anyway.

Forgot Something Important

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you forgot to tell us taxpayers how much it's goin' cost us.

And in addition

[Kludge]

3) The LHC does not run as continuously as a telescope. Optical telescopes run 12x7x365.

Re:And in addition

[Anonymous Coward]

No they don't.

what is the difference between funding and financi

[Anonymous Coward]

? What's the difference?

half a billion

[raymorris]

The budget is $483 million.

  I do wonder if the iPhone 9 won't have similar resolution, and be completed at around the same time.

The weight of 200 garden variety digital cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

The DoE digital camera comes with 3.2 gigapixel capability, and it weights 3 ton

A garden variety digital camera comes with 16 megapixel capability, and they normally weight 250-350 gram

Resolution wise --- 200 X 16 megapixel is equivalent to 3.2 gigapixel

Weight wise --- 200 X 350 grams is about 70 kilograms

What's up with the DoE camera?

Why must it weigh so much????

Why can't DoE get the Japs to build them a much lighter weight version, 3.2 gigapixel digital camera instead?????

Re:The weight of 200 garden variety digital camera

[Greystripe]

Maybe it has to be able to survive a fall from greater than 1 meter, although I doubt anyone will be carrying one around in their breast pockets.

Why So Big?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using 2,000 Samsung Galaxy S4, as an example, and some super simple stitching software we can achieve 3.2 gigapixels.

2,000 S4s weight 575 pounds. Why is this thing so big and heavy?

http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel-drone-surveillance-camera-revealed

Re:Why So Big?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe should try reading the article before posting? Oh wait, this is Slashdot. My bad

Is your S4-design capable of N-UV to N-IR? Does it have a mechanism for changing filters? But hey, maybe you armchair astronomers should build that 2000 S4 camera and show how super-bad the LSST design is?

Re:The weight of 200 garden variety digital camera

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't read enough to be able to answer that, but perhaps it has to do with the sizes of the pixels. As you may know, the difference between the pictures your smartphone names and a DSLR makes have to do with the size of the sensor. A bigger sensor (in terms of area, even if for the same number of megapixels) means more light-collecting area. In this case, given that they are trying to observe distant objects and they probably want to get fast exposures, the area of the sensor should be pretty big...

483m on most powerful camera

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot's most confusing headline parse, ever? Spent a puzzled 30 seconds with my cup of coffee trying to figure out what type of green wavelength might be termed "construction"

Re:483m on most powerful camera

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound pretty stupid ...

Re:The weight of 200 garden variety digital camera

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that your average smartphone / DSLR camera is not very sensitive in the N-UV to N-IR range.

Pr0n?

[Eelkonio]

If they're not shooting any pr0n with this camera, I doubt it will catch on.

Re:The weight of 200 garden variety digital camera

[niftymitch]

In a consumer product based price comparison start from this
    https://www.cinema5d.com/canon...
The Canon ME20F-SH – A Lowlight Camera with 4 Million ISO is closer to the design
needs of this telescope.
This telescope will have low temperature sensors (heavy) to increase the IR side and
reduce over all signal to noise problems.

As for the Defense Department ... I recall a discussion of a program to detect and track rocks in space
that might impact the earth. Then there was DARPA and TCP/IP without which this forum might never
have happened.

BTW: this telescope is COOL. The data may be public inside of hours and all the backyard astronomers
will be accessing it from their tablet computers. I was given a half six pack into to this a year ago by
some that know and it is COOL.