How to Move the World’s Largest Camera from a California Lab to an Andes Mountaintop
A multimillion-dollar digital digital camera may revolutionize astronomy. But first it must climb a mountain midway across the globe
A employee shines a flashlight into the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s digital camera.
J. Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory/NOIRLab (CC BY 4.0)
By late subsequent 12 months, if all goes to plan, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory can have began its 10-year survey of the photo voltaic system, Milky Way and galaxies past. Its large eye on the southern skies is a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera with the scale and weight of a small automobile. By mass and pixel decision, it’s the largest digital digital camera on Earth. It will scan the cosmos from atop a mountain known as Cerro Pachón in northern Chile.
There is only one hitch: the fragile, practically three-metric-ton machine is at the moment some 10,000 kilometers away within the hills above San Francisco Bay, the place its builders have put it by way of ultimate assessments. In the approaching weeks the exactly engineered digital camera will start a tense intercontinental voyage through which it is going to be flown by cargo airplane, hauled by truck and painstakingly escorted up twisty mountain roads.
The daunting logistics fall to members of an obscure however consequential engineering subfield devoted to retaining multimillion-dollar astronomy {hardware} intact in transit. This is “a really apparent and visual second when issues can go mistaken,” says engineer Margaux Lopez of the Rubin Observatory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who’s accountable for the hassle.
On supporting science journalism
If you are having fun with this text, contemplate supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By buying a subscription you might be serving to to make sure the way forward for impactful tales in regards to the discoveries and concepts shaping our world right this moment.
The Rubin digital camera’s journey begins in a clear room in Silicon Valley, the place SLAC will outfit the digital camera with a steel-and-wire-rope exoskeleton. “It’s a body sitting on springs on one other body, primarily,” says SLAC and Rubin engineer Martin Nordby. This protect will preserve the digital camera tucked inside the confines of an ordinary transport container and shield its delicate innards from vibrations. Then, over two days in May, SLAC personnel will drive the digital camera’s container and 49 crates of kit to San Francisco International Airport, the place every part will probably be packed aboard a chartered Boeing 747 cargo airplane for the 16-hour flight to the Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport in Santiago, Chile.
The Rubin workforce is comparatively fortunate: components of different telescopes in improvement, additionally certain for observatories beneath Chile’s exceptionally clear skies, should spend weeks touring at sea. When the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope sends its five-story-tall assist construction—too giant to suit right into a freight plane—from Germany to Chile, it would have to take action by way of break-bulk cargo ship by the use of Antwerp, Belgium.
The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT)’s large mirrors are taking the ocean route from Europe to Chile, too. “Historically…, we shipped largely every part by airplane, however with the brand new sort of sizes we’re speaking about with the ELT, planes both usually are not large enough or the prices are ridiculously excessive,” says Hervé Kurlandczyk, an engineer for the European Southern Observatory, who works on ELT and isn’t concerned with the Rubin mission.
Physical injury is all the time a risk, regardless of the route or mode of transport. Astronomy, by design, requires among the most delicate elements on the earth. Anything from bumps within the street to turbulence within the air can rattle delicate electronics or jostle painstakingly positioned components out of alignment. Mirrors, together with Rubin’s items that arrived in Chile in 2019, could require refrigeration and humidity controls or danger injury to their coating.
Transit brings different doable complications which can be acquainted to anybody skilled in worldwide transport. Bad climate and different snafus can redirect or stall transports. Several years in the past miscommunication brought about the container ship carrying a part of the Simons Observatory to take a seat at anchor for 2 weeks off Chile, leaving observatory employees scratching their head in port. Even observatories have to clear customs, particularly when exiting the U.S.; astronomical devices made within the U.S. could, for instance, run into authorities export controls designed to maintain superior optical know-how inside the nation’s borders.
All these worries imply engineers strive “to manage, as a lot as doable, each single step of the entire chain,” Kurlandczyk says. Although Santiago is on the opposite aspect of the equator from San Francisco, SLAC will proceed to supervise the digital camera’s transit inside Chile. Once the 747 lands, its cargo will probably be loaded right into a caravan of 9 autos—every just like the curtain-side vans used to move drinks and outfitted with air-ride suspensions for extra safety from vibrations. The caravan’s six-hour street journey to the bottom of Cerro Pachón will probably be a prelude to probably the most arduous a part of the voyage: getting the digital camera from the bottom of the mountain to the observatory atop one in all its peaks.
Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/H. Stockebrand (CC BY 4.0)
This final leg will probably be a 35-kilometer journey up a winding snake of dust roads and switchbacks. It will probably be slender and dangerous, and the observatory on the prime received’t have the ability to obtain multiple truck at a time, so the method will take three days, with three vans per day. And the truck carrying the digital camera itself, escorted in entrance and behind by observatory autos, will have the ability to journey no sooner than 10 kilometers per hour. Lopez says the digital camera’s ascent will take 5 hours to make a visit that takes most different cargo about 90 minutes.
Lopez and her colleagues can take some consolation in the truth that they’ve already practiced virtually each step of the journey utilizing dummies with the identical mass because the telescope components. They’ve loaded these weights into vans pushed up and down the freeways of the San Francisco Peninsula and alongside Chilean roads; they’ve even rehearsed the flight from California to Chile.
“Every time we deal with one thing, it’s primarily the primary time it’s ever been carried out,” Lopez says. “We’ve spent loads of effort to determine methods to observe these delicate procedures with one thing that isn’t as fragile earlier than we do it with, , $25-million optics.”
More than 5 years of preparation have gone into the digital camera’s six-day journey. “This has to work. It must be profitable. We can not break something alongside the best way or lose something or—decide your favourite failure mode,” Lopez says. “But we now have a very stable logistics plan, and we’re able to go.”
