World’s largest digital camera

Jun 7, 2024

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Context (IE): The world’s largest optical astronomy digital camera is going to be hosted on the edge of the Atacama desert in Chile.
The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest on the planet, and due to its exceptionally bright skies, it is perfect for astronomy.
The camera will be mounted on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It weighs approximately three tonnes and has a resolution of 3.2 gigapixels.
The observatory comprises an eight-meter wide-field telescope, a groundbreaking camera, and an automated data processing infrastructure.

Objective: To understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter in the universe, studying the possibility of Earth colliding with asteroids or stars and planets close to the sun.
The observatory is expected to collect around 20 terabytes of data daily, culminating in a 15-petabyte catalog over its decade-long survey.

Atacama Desert

The Atacama Desert is a 600-mile-long (1,000-kilometer) plateau in the north of Chile, near the borders of Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina in South America.
It is wedged between the coastal Cordillera de la Costa mountain range and the Andes Mountains.
It is the driest nonpolar desert in the world, as well as the only true desert to receive less precipitation than the polar desert.
It is almost without vegetation, except along slopes moistened by drizzle during the winter or in mesic valleys (moderate supply of moisture) that bisect the otherwise xeric (dry) desert.
The Atacama Desert contains the world’s largest supply of sodium nitrate.

Atacama Desert - PMF IAS

Rain shadow effect of the Andes.
Off-shore trade winds & westerlies that blow far to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn (dry subsid-
ence caused by the South Pacific high-pressure cell).
Cold ocean currents: Cold Humboldt current & upwelling of cold water due to Walker Circulation.
The most arid region is situated between the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range (two-sided rain shadow).

Why is the Atacama desert dry? - PMF IAS