Say "cheese" for one space scientists' newest camera, capable of taking 3.2 billion pixel photographs — the largest single-shot photos ever taken. Designed to survey the southern sky from Chile's Rubin Observatory for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST,) this camera will help us peer back into the universe and answer questions like how galaxies evolved and how theories of dark matter mesh with our reality. But before this super-sensitive camera hits the big leagues, scientists tested it

Overview

The goal of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory project is to conduct the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). LSST will deliver a 500 petabyte set of images and data products that will address some of the most pressing questions about the structure and evolution of the universe and the objects in it. The Rubin Observatory LSST is designed to address four science areas:

• Understanding Dark Matter and Dark Energy
• Hazardous Asteroids and the Remote Solar System
• The Transient Optical Sky
• The Formation and Structure of the Milky Way

The scientific questions that Rubin Observatory will address are profound, and yet the concept behind the design of Rubin Observatory is remarkably simple: conduct a deep survey over an enormous area of sky; do it with a frequency that enables images of every part of the visible sky to be obtained every few nights; and continue in this mode for ten years to achieve astronomical catalogs thousands of times larger than have ever previously been compiled.

The construction phase of the project will deliver the facilities needed to conduct the survey: a large-aperture, wide-field, optical imaging telescope; a gigapixel camera; and a data management system.