A space camera million times the price of Rolls Royce is set to shoot the universe

Biggest Digital Space Camera: Scientists have created a shockingly massive digital camera which is the largest to have ever existed on Earth. The camera has a resolution of3.2 billion pixels and tooknine years to be made.

World's Biggest Digital Space Camera

The LSST Camera is the largest digital camera ever created by humans for astronomy and it will work as the Vera Rubin Observatory's centerpiece. The camera will start exploring the southern skies.

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What will the massive camera do?

The camera will collect 60 petabytes of data on the universe's composition, the expansion of the universe, the solar system, the formation of our galaxy and the nature and distribution of dark energy and dark matter.

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A 5.1-foot-wide optical lens will be used by the camera to capture a 15-second exposure of the sky after every 20 seconds. The filters will be changed automatically by the camera to view light in various wavelengths from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared.

The camera will also capture the fleeting events for other scientists on which they can train their telescopes and monitor changes happening in the southern sky.

In an SLAC release, the University of Washington's astrophysicist and director of the Rubin Observatory’s construction Zeljko Ivezic said, "We will soon start producing the greatest movie of all time and the most informative map of the night sky ever assembled."

This camera costs a million times more than aRolls Royce!

To those wondering how much this camera costs, its price is a million times that of an actual Rolls Royce. The camera weighs 6,200 pounds (2,812 kilogrammes), which is much more than the expensive car.

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One can purchase a Maserati by selling one of the 21 rafts which are attached to the camera’s focal plane.

SLAC physicist and lead on the camera programme Aaron Roodman said, “I’m personally most excited to study the expansion of the Universe using gravitational lenses to better understand Dark Energy."

“That means two things: 1) measuring the brightness in all six of our filters of literally billions of galaxies and very carefully measuring their shape, which has been subtly altered by the bending of light by matter, and 2) discovering and studying very special objects where a distant quasar is almost perfectly lined up with a more nearby galaxy," he added.

(With inputs from agencies)