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

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?

[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.

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

[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