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The world's largest digital camera has been installed on a new telescope designed to hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids.
The camera was installed on the PS1 telescope in Maui, Hawaii, US, the first of four telescopes being built as part of a project called the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS).
Pan-STARRS will make frequent scans of the sky, searching for asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth.
Typical consumer digital cameras offer imaging chips just a few millimetres across. The new Pan-STARRS camera, by contrast, boasts a light-detecting surface that spans 40 centimetres. Sixty separate chips lie on that surface, providing a total of 1.4 billion pixels.
"This is a truly giant instrument," says John Tonry of the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Hawaii, who led the team that developed the camera. "It allows us to measure the brightness of the sky in 1.4 billion places simultaneously."
"This camera is an incredibly complex instrument, and getting it working has been a magnificent achievement by IfA scientists and engineers," says Rolf-Peter Kudritzki, director of the IfA, which manages the Pan-STARSS project.
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The camera was installed on the PS1 telescope in Maui, Hawaii, US, the first of four telescopes being built as part of a project called the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS).
Pan-STARRS will make frequent scans of the sky, searching for asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth.
Typical consumer digital cameras offer imaging chips just a few millimetres across. The new Pan-STARRS camera, by contrast, boasts a light-detecting surface that spans 40 centimetres. Sixty separate chips lie on that surface, providing a total of 1.4 billion pixels.
"This is a truly giant instrument," says John Tonry of the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Hawaii, who led the team that developed the camera. "It allows us to measure the brightness of the sky in 1.4 billion places simultaneously."
"This camera is an incredibly complex instrument, and getting it working has been a magnificent achievement by IfA scientists and engineers," says Rolf-Peter Kudritzki, director of the IfA, which manages the Pan-STARSS project.
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