Ranked as the top U.S. ground-based national priority for astronomy for the current decade, Vera C. Rubin Observatory is currently under construction in Chile. During its first 10 years of operations, the observatory will conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of the entire visible southern sky and provide the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed. Its vast public archive of data will dramatically advance our knowledge of the dark energy and dark matter that make up 95 percent of the universe, as well as galaxy formation and potentially hazardous asteroids. 

SLAC is leading the design and fabrication of the LSST Camera, which will be mounted on the Simonyi Survey Telescope. Professor Steven M. Kahn is the director of the observatory, and SLAC personnel are also participating in the data management. Rubin Observatory is a federal project jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, with early construction funding received from private donations through the LSST Corporation.

Visit our LSST Camera website for more info »

3-billion-pixel Camera

Construction of the LSST Camera began in 2015 in a clean room at SLAC. The size of a small car and weighing more than 3 tons, the 3.2-gigapixel camera will be the largest digital camera ever built for ground-based optical astronomy. Displaying just one of its full-sky images would require more than 1,500 high-definition TV screens.

Watch the LSST Camera video »