If there happen to be any lifeforms flitting about our solar system, let’s hope they aren’t camera-shy. The world’s largest digital camera is set to drop its first photo dump Monday, June 23, offering the public a glimpse of space so rich, the rest of us will feel like Katy Perry aboard a Blue Origin rocket.
Construction on the camera, dubbed the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), began with a ceremony in 2015, although inklings of its development can be traced back to 2005. It wasn’t until May 2024, however, that the digital camera became operational after it was transported from California to Chile’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
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Now, a little more than a year later, its first set of photos will be shared with the public during a livestream that kicks off at 11 a.m. ET on Monday, via the Rubin Observatory’s official YouTube channel.
Boasting the size of a small car, the LSST holds the Guinness World Records distinction as the largest digital camera on Earth.
What is the LSST capable of?
According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which spearheaded the project alongside the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the LSST has a resolution capacity of 3,200 megapixels, as compared to the 10 to 20 megapixel power generally found in a commercially available camera.
To put that in perspective, literally, the LSST could take a clear photo of a golf ball from 15 miles away. The DOE said LSST will be taking those high-resolution images of space every 20 seconds on clear nights over the next decade. Put another way, the camera will capture the entire sky above the Southern Hemisphere about every three days.
The result? A new catalogue of some 37 billion astronomical objects, providing unparalleled insights into the final frontier.
Unprecedented look at dark energy, dark matter
Of particular interest to astronomers and researchers are dark matter and dark energy, two areas of research that Vera C. Rubin, an astrophysicist and the namesake of the Chilean observatory that houses the LSST, helped pioneer.
Dark matter is invisible and thus remains a particularly elusive field of study. Nevertheless, it does leave behind faint imprints. Astrophysicist Alex Drlica-Wagner of the University of Chicago told National Geographic that LSST and the Rubin Observatory will help astronomers “map out where the dark matter is by how we see the light bending as it travels to us.”
Unlike dark matter, however, dark energy does not leave any trace in its wake. Rather, it’s a “mysterious force that is causing the universe to expand ever more quickly,” according to the DOE, which hopes the LSST will provide insights into the history of the universe’s expansion over time.
“No other telescope has been able to detect both real-time changes in the sky and faint or distant objects at the same time on this enormous scale,” the NSF and DOE wrote in a media release. “These capabilities mean that exceedingly rare events in the sky, never detected before, will be captured for the first time.”