|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Hope distant galaxies visible from the Chilean night sky are smiling down on Earth, because they’re about to be photographed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s 3,200-megapixel LSST camera soon.
The camera, that weighs around 3,000 kilograms, or 3 metric tons, with a front lens that’s over five feet wide, will be transported to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile by the middle of May.
The camera’s journey will not end there. Once it reaches the observatory, the camera will be driven up the 8,900-foot-high Cerro Pachón mountain in the Andes, where it will be hoisted on top of the Simonyi Survey Telescope.
The team of scientists that created the camera at the Menlo Park-based laboratory addressed members of the media last week.
Aaron Roodman, SLAC professor and deputy director and camera program lead of Rubin Observatory, said the camera will take roughly 1,000 images of the southern hemisphere sky per night, for the next 10 years.
“We estimate between 15 and 20 terabytes of image data every night,” he said.
The team expects to capture images of exploding stars, distant galaxies, asteroids, dark matter and dark energy. “Many of us expect discoveries. We expect to really find the unknown,” he said.
Some of the team members at SLAC have been working on this project for 20 years.
“We’re so excited the camera is finally complete and ready to be sent to Chile,” Roodman said.
Roodman also said the data generated by this project is public, unlike a lot of astronomical and astrophysics projects that come with a “propriety period,” when data collected by the team cannot be shared with anyone outside the project. “That’s not true here,” he said. “It will be made available to the whole U.S. science community and selected international partners.”
Stuart Marshall, camera operations scientist, said in an interview with this publication, that “what will be constructed from this is representation of the sky with the universe and its structure going back in time. There’s lots of other telescopes that do the same thing but with a more limited field of view, limited scope. This is going to be brighter and bigger, it has greater numbers and detail.”
The findings might even create a controversy within the astronomical and scientific community. “It will give us confirmation on some existing things that we already know or maybe it will move the needle a little bit in one direction or the other,” he said.
Marshall is particularly excited about observing things in outer space that change over time.
“We’ll come back and visit the same places every three or four days, for 10 years,” he said. Every spot on the sky will be photographed thousands of times over a decade, affording detailed comparisons over time. “And we’ll see them in different colored filters.”
When the project first began, Marshall was working at Livermore National Laboratory. He subsequently moved to SLAC but spent only a fraction of his time on this project initially. Around 2012, he got involved full time. His role was in the area of controlling the coordination of multiple systems and pieces that comprise the camera and how it functions.
“It’s a distributed, complex system,” he said, going on to give an example. “All these electronics in total generate about 3,000 watts of heat and it (the camera) is on a telescope. That heat can’t go out into the air. You have to absorb it and get it out of the telescope.”
Working on the camera over the last decade came with many challenges, including troubleshooting.
“One of the things I worked on the most is — while the camera is running, if something goes wrong, how do we respond to protect it so that we don’t break anything?” he said. “That for me has been the most stressful thing — in preparing for trying to cover all of our basis of things that can go wrong.”
In fact, one of the last things that went wrong was the failure and consequent replacement of the turbo pump, which is a vacuum pump in the camera. Marshall is happy that’s behind him, but has a lot more work to look forward to; by the end of this month, he is all set to move to Chile for the next two years or so to continue working on the project.
The prospect excites him. After all, he is pretty much living his dream.
“I grew up as a kid during the Apollo era,” Marshall said, about his days growing up in Baltimore, Maryland. “Everybody was really excited by science in the mid-to-late ’60s. It was incredibly exciting. I saw astronauts on the moon when I was in school, at my desk — they wheeled in a television.”
Keeping all scientific jargon aside, he deconstructs his upcoming work in Chile in the simplest terms: “Step back, stay calm … and make sure we don’t screw up.”