A 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera designed by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is now one step closer to reality. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) camera, which will capture the widest, fastest, and deepest view of the night sky ever observed, has received “Critical Decision 1” approval by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to move into the next stage of the project.

The  telescope will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data—about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. These deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter, and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy, and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics.

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