So much data will be produced, in fact, that there will be two dedicated 40 GB high speed fiber-optic data lines to handle it. All of that data will travel to the Archive Center in the US. There, it’ll be processed and stored, and made available to the community.

All of this image gathering and processing will create the Rubin Observatory’s output: panoramic wide field images of the southern sky, one every few nights for 10 years. All those images will add up to one big, ten year long video of the night sky.

That will be the Rubin Observatory’s primary contribution to astronomy: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST will be a catalog of some 20 billion galaxies, more galaxies than there are humans. It will find all kinds of transient objects, like asteroids zipping around our Solar System, as well as distant supernovae. It’ll help map out dark matter and dark energy, and also our own Milky Way.

The camera sensor system is made up of units called rafts. Each raft contains several sensors each, and there are two types of rafts. 21 rafts contain nine sensors each, and those 21 are responsible for acquiring the images. Then there are four specialty rafts. They contain three sensors each, and are responsible for focusing the camera, and synchronizing with the rotation of the Earth.

“These specifications are just astounding,” said Steven Ritz, project scientist for the LSST Camera at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “These unique features will enable the Rubin Observatory’s ambitious science program.”