Staff members gave the media a tour of the newly built 3,200-megapixel LSST camera, the largest camera ever built, at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., on Thursday, April 11, 2024. After two decades of operation, the device will soon be packed up and transported to mountain peak in Chile to help researchers better understand dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the universe. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The world’s largest camera was on its way from its birthplace at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park to a mountain peak half a hemisphere away in the foothills of the Andes.
ieeverything was on track, until domestic protests in Chile threatened to disrupt his safe arrival. But as luck would have it, the Chilean president took charge and cleared the way.
“This was a very high-stakes operation. It’s the future of American astronomy,” said SLAC engineer and camera project manager Travis Lange. “There are literally thousands of people who plan to use the data.”
In addition to its famous linear accelerator, used to find the tiniest particles in space, and now a massive camera, SLAC is known for building large, sophisticated machines that use X-rays, lasers and electron beams to solve enigmas on earth and in space.
Most of the monumental journey has gone smoothly for the $168 million instrument, which will provide unprecedented views of the universe and enable ground-breaking astronomical research from its site at the purpose-built Rubin Observatory atop Chile’s Cerro Pachón ridge.
His slow, pre-dawn journey began May 14 in a shipping container on a flatbed truck that traveled from SLAC up Interstate 280 and then down to San Francisco International Airport. Within hours, the container holding the 5½-foot-tall, 10-foot-long, 6,250-pound camera was securely attached to the floor of the chartered 747 cargo jet, along with two additional containers and dozens of crates holding related equipment.
The nearly 11-hour flight to Santiago, Chile, also went well, said Lange and fellow SLAC engineer Margaux Lopez, who led the operation to pack and ship the devices to the observatory.
But they had no plans to strike for truck drivers who blocked highways around Santiago, the country’s capital, in protests that threatened to cause a huge logistical problem in the transport mission.
Recognizing the camera’s importance to science, Chilean Interior Minister Carolina Tohá Morales received a call about the blockade from an official of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, then called President Gabriel Boric, who ordered a police escort to allow the camera to pass.
There were several setbacks as the nine-truck camera convoy wound its way for more than six hours along a 22-mile dirt road to Cerro Pachón at about 8,900 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Andes, notably due to the loss of traction of the vehicle carrying the camera container, but it safely arrived in mid on May 16.
On Tuesday, Lopez, who has been working on the transportation plan since 2018, said she was “relieved” and “proud, too.” As soon as she learned of the strike and separate industrial action involving equipment operators at the Santiago airport, she came up with five different scenarios to solve the problem.
“Even though there were some setbacks, we were able to resolve all the things that happened,” Lopez said via video from an observatory in Chile. “Things have mostly gone according to plan, which is pretty impressive.”
Sending the hugely expensive and important Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera — with its 189 sensitive light sensors, five delicate filters and a variety of complex electronics — by road, air, and then road again put a heavy burden on Lopez and Lange.
“It’s a little bit like sending your kid off to college,” Lange said. “It’s wonderful and terrifying at the same time.”
At the Rubin Observatory, the camera will be attached to the end of the giant telescope, probably in October or November, Lange said. Once installed and set up, it will take photos of 20 billion galaxies, which will be stitched together into vast panoramas that provide astronomers with ever-changing views of star collisions and explosions, asteroids and mysterious interstellar phenomena including dark energy and dark matter.
Given the scientific value of the instrument, SLAC has kept the transport mission under wraps, refusing to specify when the camera will head for the San Francisco airport.
“I like to think that there are no bad actors who would sabotage something like this, but it’s not hard for us not to advertise that it’s going through the door,” Lange said earlier.
Building the camera required a facility with air 1,000 times cleaner than the average indoor space, to prevent dust and other materials from falling on the highly sensitive outer lens and degrading its quality or entering the inner workings of the device.
Engineers custom-built a sealed clean room with a 24-foot ceiling, and everyone entering had to don head-to-toe white bunny suits and blue latex gloves, giving the daily activities a crime-scene ambiance.
Before shipping, the device was wrapped in a giant silver plastic bag and looked “like a burrito,” Lopez said. Since moisture is the instrument’s enemy, dozens of bags of moisture-trapping desiccant, each the size of a small pillow and weighing several pounds—were packed inside the bag—the industrial size of the tiny packages that come with many consumer electronics products.
The camera is bolted to a 4,000-pound yellow steel frame, then raised and lowered into an intact steel shipping container. Once inside, the frame was equipped with sensors to measure and track impacts to the camera from bumps and jolts — which post-travel data showed were minimal.
Chief among Lange’s pre-shipment concerns were the camera’s 189 custom-made silicon sensors, spaced a hair’s breadth apart and costing $150,000 each.
“It doesn’t take much movement to reduce that distance,” Lange said earlier. “If they come into contact, they break. It would be pretty bad.”
Earlier, to ensure the transport device could keep the camera safe on its way to Chile, a dummy version of the device, heavily laden with black iron practice plates and attached to impact sensors, was placed on a truck and driven around the Bay Area.
“We sent the driver on an eight-hour drive and told him, ‘Find all the worst roads you can. Hit 101. Hit 880,’ Lange said. “We recorded shocks during that process.”
Then they did a much longer test run: by truck to Miami, then by plane to Chile and to the observatory and back to Menlo Park.
Now the camera waits in its new clean room on the third level of the eight-level observatory. On deployment day, the instrument will travel up a giant elevator five levels to the facility’s dome, and technicians will use 108 large, high-strength screws to attach it to the top of the telescope.
Five months of testing follows. If all goes well, the first photons of light will enter the camera in the spring.
The camera and telescope, Lange said, “will revolutionize astronomy.”