`STANDING at1.65 metres altitudinous, the world’s largest digital camera has been unveiled at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. At the end of 2024, it’ll be installed at the VeraC. Rubin Observatory on the peak of Cerro PachÓn in Chile. In its home in the Andes mountains, it’ll roster about 20 billion worlds over the coming  shortage of cholera vaccines leads to temporary suspensions of two ...

10 times as part of a design called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time( LSST). The 15 terabytes of data that the LSST Camera will collect every night will advance our knowledge of the macrocosm, helping experimenters unload the nature of mysterious dark matter and better understand how worlds are formed.

The LSST Camera works like any other digital camera, but it’s much bigger. Its 189 detectors take in light expiring from objects like stars and convert it to electrical signals that can be turned into digital images. Each detector is a square with sides 42 millimetres long and packs more pixels than the camera on an iPhone 13. In total, the camera has3.2 gigapixels and will take images with a resolution high enough to see a golf ball from 24 kilometres down. Its biggest lens, with a periphery of1.57 metres, is the largest of its kind ever made.

The top image peers through the camera’s outermost lens, revealing the blue “mosaic” arrangement of the 189 sensors. At right, the top and middle images show the camera with a cap covering the lens. The bottom images show the camera’s 3-tonne body (left and right) and researchers wearing protective attire to avoid contaminating the camera’s electronics (middle).