LSST E-News |
Camera Team News
The largest digital camera prepares for PDR and welcomes new international member
Camera Assembly (click for a larger image).
The LSST camera will be the largest digital camera ever constructed. Its size of 1.6 meters by 3 meters is roughly the size of a small car and it will weight 2800 kilograms. It is a large-aperture, wide-field optical (0.3-1 μm) imager designed to provide a 3.5° field of view with better than 0.2 arcsecond sampling.
Steve Kahn and Kirk Gilmore (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) manage the LSST camera team, which includes members from eighteen institutions. This team is refining the camera design submitted at the Conceptual Design Review to ready it for the formal inspection of the high level Preliminary Design Review expected in early 2009. The team is carrying out system trade studies, camera mechanical design evolution, planning for camera integration and servicing, camera utilities and vacuum system design, and electronics and controls development.
One of the institutions now involved with the camera construction is the new international partner, Institute National de Physique Nucleaire de Physique des Particules (IN2P3). Researchers and engineers from IN2P3 bring technical and partnership experience to the LSST team. Collaboration on instrumentation began last fall and IN2P3 researchers are increasing participation in the science collaborations. IN2P3 is moving forward on securing a substantial French participation in the construction of the camera, which will add to the funding already secured and in the final approval stage.
IN2P3 is both a funding agency and a research institute. It brings over forty physicists, engineers and technicians located in university laboratories to the LSST efforts. IN2P3’s researchers’ main science interests are in cosmology, dark matter and dark energy. They will contribute to the supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillation, weak lensing, cluster and variable objects science collaborations. The science interests will drive their contributions to photometric calibration (instrumental and atmosphere); CCD and readout electronics for sensors; filters, filter mechanics and slow-control for filters; and software and computing. The IN2P3 experience with wide field imaging is quite valuable for LSST software development and data management. Dominique Boutigny and Jean-Yves Nief lead IN2P3 coordination in collaboration with Jeff Kantor and Ray Plante. This international collaboration will serve as the model for additional efforts as LSST grows.
For more information, contact Steve Kahn, Camera Scientist or Kirk Gilmore, Camera Manager.
Future issues of E-News will highlight details of camera sub-systems.
LSST is a public-private partnership. Funding for design and development activity comes from the National Science Foundation, private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSSTC Institutional Members:
Brookhaven National Laboratory; California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Columbia University; Google, Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Johns Hopkins University; Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology - Stanford University; Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Princeton University; Purdue University; Research Corporation; Rutgers University; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California at Davis; University of California at Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington
LSST E-News is a free email publication of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project. It is for informational purposes only, and the information is subject to change without notice.
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