Soaring into a New Era of Space Imaging
At the heart of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile sits a true aerospace engineering triumph: the LSST camera, the largest and highest-resolution digital camera ever built. Weighing over three tons and snapping 3,200-megapixel images, this optical giant is poised to revolutionize our understanding of dark matter, dark energy, and the cosmos itself.
Designed with precision aerospace-grade optics and powered by cutting-edge tech from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, the LSST camera features the largest lens ever made, massive ultra-sensitive filters, and a globe-spanning production effort—from raw materials in New York to final assembly in California, before being flown VIP-style to the Chilean Andes.
The result? A 10-year survey of the southern sky so detailed, it’s been called the “Google of the sky.” With first light expected in summer 2025, this camera isn’t just a scientific instrument—it’s a launchpad for a new era of discovery, crafted by aerospace visionaries and engineers who aimed for the stars, and landed in the universe.
Transcript
00:00:00 This is the Vera C. Ruben Observatory in Chile. Home to the largest digital camera in the world. The camera itself is about the size of a small car and weighs more than three tons. It's designed to help us ask questions about dark energy, dark matter, and mapping our solar system and galaxy. But how exactly do you outfit the world's largest camera with lenses and filters
00:00:22 that have never been made before? With a lot of creativity, a journey around the world, and holograms, of course. The observatory houses this boundary pushing camera which will conduct the legacy survey of space and time or the LSST set to be the most detailed images of our sky ever taken. What's special is that it's designed to take as many images of the southern hemisphere as
00:00:53 possible over 10 years. kind of create a a catalog slash a movie 10 years and they keep repeating that over and over again. So what that means is that you want a camera that has a large field of view, meaning you can see a lot of things at once. And because you don't want to lose in the resolution, so you want to have pictures that have good quality that can be very detailed, you
00:01:13 need a lot of pixels. So in addition to being the world's largest digital camera, it's also the world's highest resolution. It takes 3,200 megapixel pictures. That's an image of the night sky so large that it would take 1,500 TVs to view just one picture. It will also take exposure that may be very different than what you use on your phone. On your phone, you push the
00:01:35 button within milliseconds the image is taken. But the LSST camera will take 30 second exposures. That allows you to be able to see objects. It would be equivalent to seeing a golf ball 15 miles away. That's also why it's very big and that's why it needed the largest lens ever made which is almost the size of an average human. I mean, it's almost as tall as me. And so, the reason for
00:01:57 having something this big is that you want to collect as much light as possible. And not only are there three different lenses on the camera, the largest of which is officially the largest lens in the world. But the camera also requires six different glass filters, which are also huge optical components. Basically, different astrophysical bodies out in space are
00:02:15 emitting different wavelengths of light, different colors, if you will, although not necessarily the visible kind. Like to see only objects that are super bright in infrared, for example, you might want to filter out other wavelengths. Hence, a specially designed filter that only lets through infrared. The coating that you have to put on it basically reflects the lights that you
00:02:36 don't want and lets through the one that you care about. But we are talking hundreds of layers of very exotic metals and materials that are basically deposited in a very controlled ways. And the thickness of these layers, we're talking molecular level thickness of each of these layers. So very, very risky business. These lenses and these filters are, you know, very thin and
00:02:55 they're very large. What that means is that when you go and polish them, you basically have to grind them. When you do this, you have to put pressure on it. And when the aspect ratio is is so high, as you push on it, it actually deforms it. It's a big piece of glass and just the glass alone is very expensive and very hard to make. If you polish it the wrong way, you have to throw it away and
00:03:15 do it again. And that was kind of what made this lens so so unique is that it was designed such that the design included how you going to test that it actually was polished properly. Basically, instead of measuring the glass physically, you measure the way that light is reflected and refracted by the glass. Using a computer to generate a hologram of light, we can predict
00:03:35 where the light should reflect and refract if the lens is as we want it to be. And then we measure where the light actually is reflected and refracted and we can make adjustments to the lens from there. An LLM is perfectly placed to guide the fabrication and testing of stuff like this because of another unprecedented thing that we're quite familiar with which is you know just the
00:03:56 most energetic laser in the world. So on the design side, Lawrence Livermore as a lab already has this kind of collection of very smart folks, topnotch engineers and scientists and they spent decades refining their their their design tools to build those meter class optics. Now Livermore is not a manufacturing you know lab. So we provide the expertise on how you're going to test it, are you
00:04:20 going to verify it? Are you going to design it? But we have to partner with the companies that have developed the machines and the robots and and you know the manufacturing part of it so that we can end up having a product that we can actually use. The filters were made from raw materials that originally came from New York. They were then shipped to southern France where they were shaped
00:04:40 and polished using guidance and expertise provided by LNL. The filters were then transferred across the Atlantic again to Massachusetts where they were covered in custom-designed coatings. And then they were installed into their frames here at LOL before traveling to Slack National Lab to be installed into the camera itself. And then the whole thing had to make its way
00:05:00 to Chile. But how? I mean, they are fairly heavy, you know, like 300 kilos or so. So obviously don't put in your suitcase when you're talking about $200 million and 20 years of work. We just charter an entire plane just for the camera. So, it was a VIP. It had its own plane. Teams all over the world who had worked on creating these components held their breath as the camera made its way
00:05:21 to its permanent home. But in May of 2025, the LSST camera made it and was successfully installed into the observatory. First Light, or when the camera will officially start imaging the skies, is set for summer 2025 and will usher in a totally new era of astronomy. I hope that it's going to lead to many discoveries, many things that we don't know yet. you know, you really feel like
00:05:44 you are understanding the universe better and you know, it becomes more I guess philosophical in the sense that you're contributing to the self understanding of the universe from the universe itself which we're part of. So I think it's a very unique reward to basically contribute to these big projects and being able to leave a legacy. You know the Ver Rubin
00:06:03 Observatory is probably nothing of that magnitude that's going to be done for decades. And most likely my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren if they are interested in science they may actually be using some of the data that that this observatory is going to take and it's going to be the the Google of the sky for quite a while. If you have questions about this work or if you
00:06:23 want to know even more about this project, you can check out the resources we've left in the description of this video and leave us a comment on anything else you want to see us cover. You can subscribe to this channel for even more deep dives into LNL's groundbreaking scientific projects. And as always, thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.