It’s being billed as the widest-looking, fastest-shooting, deepest peering telescope on Earth. Or at least it will be when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope comes online atop a remote Chilean mountain top in 2032. The LSST, combining cutting-edge optics and massive computing power, will scan huge swaths of the heavens and peer deeper into cosmic history than ever before.
These impressive capabilities are thanks to Design Engineers like Justine Haupt, who designed both the cryostats for testing LSST’s electro-optic sensor modules and the front-end electronic assemblies (shown here) that will enable the camera transfer a whopping 1.5 billion pixels per second — almost half of the 3.2 gigapixels that constitute each LSST image. [BNL]