"Building the World's Largest Digital Camera for Cosmic Exploration"

The world's largest digital camera, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, has been assembled in California and will soon be moved to Chile's Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Weighing 6,600 pounds with a front lens measuring over five feet across, the 3,200-megapixel camera is designed to map the night sky and help uncover the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. It can capture incredibly detailed images, with the ability to resolve a golf ball from 15 miles away and cover a swath of the sky seven times wider than the full moon. The camera's main task will be to map and measure the brightness of objects in the night sky, particularly looking for weak gravitational lensing to reveal more about the universe's expansion and its link to dark energy.