The World’s Largest Digital Camera to be Built in Chile

A 3.2 billion-pixel camera named LSST, or the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, is being built in the foothills of the Andes in Chile. The camera will have a whopping 3,200 megapixels, comparing to 12 megapixels iPhone 6s camera has.

The project is to conduct a 10-year survey of the sky that will deliver a 200 petabyte set of images and data products. Basically what the camera will do is to record the entire visible nighttime sky twice a week, taking over 800 panoramic images during each of those nights. An animated 3D map of the universe will be made from these captures. The details the 3D map provides will allow scientists a new way to analyze the solar system and to study mysterious dark matter and learn more about our own Milky Way galaxy.

Scheduled to be finished by 2019, the facility will have a large-aperture, wide-field, optical imaging telescope, a giga-pixel camera, and a data management system. With high altitude, dry climate, less populated Chile is chosen by scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation to build this facility.