World's largest digital camera will photograph the universe
Details of the universe will come into sharper focus thanks to a powerful, new camera the U.S. government is funding.
The U.S. Department of Energy has approved construction of a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera that will help collect several million gigabytes of data every year and help scientists better understand the universe.
The camera will serve as the eyes of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which, beginning in 2022, will start photographing the southern sky at night from a mountain in Chile.
Over the course of a decade, the telescope will detect more galaxies than there are people on Earth and observe tens of billions of objects, the DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory said Monday. The DOE is paying for the camera's construction while the National Science Foundation is funding the telescope and its site facilities and database system.
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