PREVIEW

After 20 years of hard work, a team of scientists and engineers have finally finished the world's biggest digital camera for stargazing.

The super camera is getting ready to be set up on a telescope in Chile and is expected to change the game by collecting an amazing amount of information about space, giving us new clues on everything from dark energy to asteroids zipping around in our solar system.

After being attached to the Vera C. Observatory's special telescope, the camera will take incredibly detailed snapshots of space for the next ten years.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, where this camera will live, is a big deal project supported by both the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. The people behind it say this camera will create the most detailed and informative movie and map of the night sky we've ever seen.

To pull this off, they built a camera that's as big as a small car and weighs as much as three small cars. Its main lens is so huge that no lens like it has ever been made before for looking at stars. And the level of detail it can capture is so fine that if you wanted to see one of its full-size photos, you'd need hundreds of the best TVs lined up together. It's so powerful it could spot a golf ball from 15 miles away.

By examining the captured images, scientists can delve into mysteries of the universe like how galaxies bend light from other galaxies far behind them, a trick that helps figure out where stuff is in the universe and how it's moving.

They're also looking to map out where all the dark matter is by spotting clusters and watching for the explosions of stars, which can tell us a lot about dark energy and dark matter. Closer to home, they hope to track down small objects in our solar system, giving us a clearer picture of how it came to be and spotting any asteroids that might be coming too close for comfort.

With the camera, scientists are excited about getting a much clearer view of our universe, helping unravel its biggest mysteries, from how it's put together to understanding the various objects within it.

Contributions to this massive project came from labs and experts all over, including Brookhaven National Laboratory for the camera's digital sensors, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the lens design, and France's National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, which helped with sensor and electronics design and created a system to switch filters so the camera can capture light in different ways.