Ball Aerospace has shipped and delivered the large camera lens assembly to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, which will be incorporated into the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a ground telescope that will sit on top of Cerro Pachón ridge, an 8,800-foot mountain in Chile.
Ball teamed with Arizona Optical Systems (AOS) to build the lens assembly, which consists of two large refractive lenses, named L1 and L2, and the precision structure that will be used to mount the lens assembly to the LSST camera.
“We are happy to support the LSST program, which will be revolutionary for astronomy. As one of the largest digital cameras to be constructed for a ground telescope, the design, fabrication, mounting and testing of the 1.6-meter diameter L1 and 1.2-meter L2 lenses was a very challenging and rewarding effort that involved significant collaboration and teamwork over a five-year period.”
Once completed, the LSST will explore dark matter, dark energy, the transient optical sky including asteroids and astronomical events, and the formation and structure of the Milky Way. Every three nights, the LSST will take a full image of the night sky capturing billions of objects in six colors to create a picture of the universe.
Ball Aerospace has a long heritage of designing and building high-performance optical systems for space telescopes. For example, Ball designed and built the advanced optical technology and lightweight mirror system for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Including JWST, Ball has contributed to all of NASA’s Great Observatories — Compton Gamma Ray, Hubble, Chandra X-Ray, Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. For more information, visit www.ball.com/aerospace or connect on Facebook or Twitter.
Source: Ball Aerospace (Boulder, Colorado)
