The north Chileone of the most suitable spots for astronomical observations with its arid mountains and clear sky, is preparing to welcome the larger astronomical camera that has ever been built in the hope of a revolutionary change in the study of the universe.

The size of a small car and weighing 2.8 tons, the device will be mounted on a telescope under construction and will allow the sky to be explored like never before, officials of the United States-funded program told AFP.

This massive camera, which cost about $800 million to build, will begin taking its first images during the first half of 2025. Every three days it will sweep the sky, repeating the motion ad infinitum.

We will go from “studying one star and all the deep physics of that star to studying billions of stars at the same time,” said Bruno Dias, president of the Chilean Astronomical Society (Sochias).

“It’s going to be a paradigm shift in astronomy,” says Stuart Corder, deputy director of NoirLab, the US research center that runs the 2,500m-plus observatory at Cerro Pachon, 560km north. of the capital Santiago.

With this program, Chile is consolidating its position in the field of astronomical observation, with a third of the most powerful telescopes on the planet installed on its soil, according to data from the Chilean Astronomical Society.

The LSST (Space-Time Research as a Legacy for Posterity) camera is expected to have data on twenty million galaxies, 17 billion stars and six million space objects within ten years.

Scientists will have an updated catalog of images of the solar system, will be able to map the Milky Way and advance the research of energy and dark matter.

300 telescopes for one image

The device will have a 3,200-megapixel digital sensor, and its image will be equivalent to that of more than 300 medium-sized high-definition televisions combined.

The device, manufactured in California, will have three times the capacity of the most powerful camera available today, Japan’s Hyper Suprime-Cam 870 megapixels. It will also be six times more powerful than NoirLab’s most powerful camera today.

The telescope that will incorporate it has a mirror with a diameter of 8.4 meters. It is a far cry from the 40cm telescope that arrived in Chile 60 years ago, when the country’s first international observatory was installed at Cerro Tololo in the 1960s.

“That telescope got here on the back of a mule because there was no road,” explains Stephen Heathcote, director of the Cerro Tololo observatory, located about 20 km from Cerro Pachon.

The capital of astronomy

The Vera C. Rubin observatory, named after the American astronomer who discovered dark matter, which will host the huge camera, is one of Chile’s major astronomy centers.

The natural conditions of the desert zones of the northern part of the country, between the Pacific ocean and the Andes cordillera, create the clearest skies on the planet, thanks to the weak cloud cover and the dry climate.

Chile is home to telescopes from more than thirty countries, including some of the most powerful astronomical instruments in the world, such as the ALMA space telescope or the Extremely Large Telescope, the most powerful optical instrument ever built, which will observe from 2027 distances which have not yet been conquered.

Although other countries such as the United States, Australia, China and Spain have also installed powerful observing equipment, “Chile is unbeatable” in astronomy, says the president of the Chilean Astronomical Society.