Staff members guide media through the newly built 3,200-megapixel LSST camera, the largest camera ever built, on Thursday, April 11, 2024, at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. After two decades of work, the device will soon be packaged and transported to a mountaintop in Chile to help researchers better understand dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the universe. (Jane Engelska/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. But there was a problem. And the solution required an order from Chilean President Gabriel Boric.
“This was a very risky operation. It’s the future of U.S. astronomy,” said SLAC engineer and camera project manager Travis Lange. “There are literally thousands of people planning to use the data.”
In addition to its famous linear accelerator, which detects the smallest particles in the universe, and its new giant camera, SLAC is also known for building large, sophisticated machines that use X-rays, lasers and electron beams to solve mysteries on Earth and in the cosmos .
Most of the monumental journey went smoothly for the $168 million instrument. From its location in the purpose-built Ruby Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile, it will provide never-before-seen insights into space and enable groundbreaking astronomical research.
The slow, predawn journey began May 14 in a cargo container on a flatbed truck that traveled from SLAC up Highway 280 and then down to San Francisco International Airport. Within hours, the container containing the 5 1/2-foot-tall, 10-foot-long, 6,250-pound camera was securely attached to the floor of a chartered 747 cargo jet, along with two other containers and dozens of boxes of associated camera equipment.
The almost eleven-hour flight to Santiago de Chile also went well, said Lange and his SLAC colleague Margaux Lopez, who were in charge of packing and shipping the device to the observatory.
But they had no plans to strike truck drivers blocking highways around Santiago, the country’s capital, amid protests that threatened to deliver a huge logistical blow to the transportation task.
It is a testament to the camera’s importance to science that Chilean Interior Minister Carolina Tohá Morales took the call about the blockade from an official from the Association of Universities for Astronomical Research and then called Boric, who ordered a police escort so the camera could get through.
There were a few problems as the nine-truck camera convoy spent more than six hours driving up a 22-mile gravel road to Cerro Pachón, about 8,900 feet in elevation, in the foothills of the Andes—most notably a loss of traction in the vehicle carrying the camera container—but it arrived safely by noon on May 16.
On Tuesday, Lopez, who has been working on the transportation plan since 2018, said she was “very relieved” and “proud, too.” Once she learned of the strike and a separate labor action involving equipment workers at Santiago Airport, she developed five different scenarios to address the problems.
“Although there were some problems, we were able to resolve everything that happened,” Lopez said via video from the observatory in Chile. “Most things went according to plan, which is pretty impressive.”
Shipping the extremely expensive and important “Legacy Survey of Space and Time” camera with its 189 sensitive light sensors, five delicate filters and various complex electronics by road, air and then again by road was a heavy burden for Lopez and Lange.
“It’s kind of like sending your kid to college,” Lange said. “It’s wonderful and terrifying at the same time.”
At the Rubin Observatory, the camera will likely be screwed onto the end of a giant telescope in October or November, Lange said. Once installation and setup is complete, photos of 20 billion galaxies will be captured, stitched together into expansive panoramas, providing astronomers with ever-changing views of colliding and exploding stars, asteroids, and mysterious interstellar phenomena such as dark energy and dark matter.
Given the value of the instrument and its importance to science, SLAC had kept the transport mission secret and refused to say when the camera would leave for 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 announce that it’s going through the door,” Lange said previously.
Building the camera required a facility where the air is 1,000 times cleaner than an average indoor space. This should prevent dust and other substances from getting onto the highly sensitive outer lens and impairing its quality or penetrating the inner workings of the device.
Engineers custom-built a sealed clean room with a 24-foot-high ceiling, and everyone who entered it had to dress from head to toe in white bunny suits and blue latex gloves, giving everyday activities the atmosphere of a crime scene.
Before shipping, the device was wrapped in a giant silver plastic bag and looked “like a burrito,” Lopez said. Since moisture is an enemy of the instrument, dozens of bags of moisture-binding desiccant went into the bag, each the size of a small pillow and weighing several pounds—industrial versions of the small bags that accompany many consumer electronics products.
The camera was bolted to a 4,000-pound yellow steel frame, then lifted and lowered into a pristine steel shipping container, where the frame was outfitted with sensors to measure and track the effects of shock and vibration on the camera – which, according to data of the trip were minimal.
Lange’s main concerns before delivery included the camera’s 189 custom-made silicon sensors, which were just a hair’s breadth apart and cost $150,000 each.
“It doesn’t take a lot of movement to close that gap,” Lange said previously. “If they touch, they break. It would be pretty bad.”
To ensure that the transport device could keep the camera safe on its journey to Chile, a dummy version of the device, heavily loaded with black iron plates and equipped with impact sensors, was previously loaded onto a truck and driven around the Bay Area.
“We sent the driver on an eight-hour drive and said, ‘Find the worst roads you can find.’ Hit 101. Hit 880,” Lange said. “We logged the vibrations during that process.”
Then they did a much longer test run: by truck to Miami, then by plane to Chile and up to the observatory grounds and back to Menlo Park.
Now the camera waits in its new clean room on the third floor of the eight-story observatory. On installation day, the instrument will be transported in a giant elevator up five floors to the facility’s dome, and technicians will attach it to the top of the telescope with 108 large, high-strength bolts.
Five months of testing follow. If all goes well, the first photons of light will enter the camera in spring.
Camera and telescope, said Lange, “will revolutionize astronomy.”