Look at all the neat toys they’ve justified using the search for it as the primary excuse to build them.
Here’s the latest …
https://news.yahoo.com/world-largest-ca ... 18839.html
Now the camera is the size of a car, weighs 6200 lbs, and is exceedingly complex. It even requires special cooling. All for a measly $168 MILLION dollars. And that’s on top of the cost of the observatory where it will be installed, whose need was (in their words) ... “probing dark energy and dark matter”. And it's budget is now over half a billion dollars, although that may include the camera. Hard to tell.A lab in the US is close to completing the construction of the world’s largest digital camera, featuring a five-foot (1.65m) wide lens and a 3,200-megapixel camera.
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is being built by researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University for the purpose of capturing the night sky in never-before-seen detail.
Once finished, the camera will be transported to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile where it will be placed atop the Simonyi Survey Telescope.
With a field of view of 9.6 square degrees – nearly 40 times more than the size of the Moon when viewed from Earth – astronomers will be able to capture variations in brightness of the 37 billion stars within its view, as well as other periodic instabilities that have been previously impossible to observe.
In doing so, scientists hope it will bring new understanding to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, such as the nature of dark matter.
Too bad Starlink (and other planned) satellites threaten to destroy its utility. Simulations of the LSST with the planned 40,000 Starlink satellites (currently there are over 3000) show that as many as 30% of all LSST images would contain at least one satellite streak. But other organizations are planning or already launching Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites too. And with a planned total number of 400,000 (yes, that number is right!), ever LSST image would have numerous bright streaks. They might not be able to *see* DM through all those streaks. So they'll need to spend even more money to do it. See the way Big Science works? Ingenious.