Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...The world’s largest camera, built in Menlo Park and stationed on a mountaintop in Chile, on Tuesday began capturing images for a 10-year effort to turn the night sky into what scientists call “the greatest cosmic movie ever made.”
Built at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the 6,250-pound camera is now starting the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a decade-long project expected to photograph billions of galaxies, exploding stars, asteroids and other changes across the cosmos.
The $168 million, 5½-foot tall camera was shipped in a secretive, tightly orchestrated mission in May 2024 from SLAC to the Rubin Observatory in Chile, where it was bolted to the end of a giant telescope 8,900 feet high in the foothills of the Andes mountains. Researchers began releasing preliminary images in June 2025.
Now, the camera’s central mission has begun.
“It’s taken 20 years of hard science, engineering, and more to get to the point where we can call ‘action’ as we start rolling on this blockbuster movie of the universe,” said Phil Marshall, deputy director of Rubin operations for SLAC.
The Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. The project gives SLAC, long known for probing the universe’s smallest particles and operated by Stanford University, a central role in one of astronomy’s largest efforts to map the cosmos.
Billions of images from the 3,200-megapixel camera will be stitched together in broad panoramas, giving astronomers sweeping views of exploding stars, stellar collisions, asteroids and mysterious interstellar phenomena.
From its perch 8,900 feet high in the Andes foothills, the camera is now gathering a new, detail-rich image every 40 seconds and producing up to 7 million alerts per night when it detects changes in the cosmos, SLAC said in a news release. The length of the survey matters because some cosmic changes unfold slowly, unpredictably or rarely. Over the next decade, the project will photograph each area of the sky it covers about 800 times, allowing scientists to uncover subtle events, capture moving objects and study the accelerating expansion of the universe.
It took some 10 years to build the 10-foot-long camera, whose 189 custom-made silicon sensors, separated by gaps thinner than a few human hairs, cost $150,000 each.
Once complete, the instrument was packed in a huge silver plastic bag, fastened onto a flatbed truck and slowly driven from SLAC up Interstate 280 and down to San Francisco International Airport, before being flown to Chile on a 747 cargo jet.
While the Hubble Space Telescope provides more detail and the Webb Space Telescope looks deeper into space, both orbiting instruments have a much smaller field of view. By contrast, Rubin is designed to repeatedly scan vast portions of the southern sky, gathering images of the entire southern night sky every three days. That will give scientists a broader, more time-rich view of the cosmos than any telescope has captured before.
Scientists expect the survey to help them spot bursting stars, discover new asteroids, study black holes and trace the evolution of galaxies, including the Milky Way. The project also could help researchers better understand dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious forces thought to shape the structure and expansion of the universe.
The project, Rubin Observatory operations director Bob Blum said, will “change how we do astronomy and astrophysics, allowing researchers anywhere to participate in cutting-edge science.”