LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope)

The aim of the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) project is to build the world largest wide-field survey telescope. The system with primary mirror of 8.4 m diameter, field of view of 10 deg squared and a 3.2 gigapixel CCD camera is expected to be finished in 2015. With these parameters the telescope will be able to map the whole visible sky in mere 3 nights. During 10 years it will be able to take at least 300 pictures of each position on the sky and thus to create a “movie of deep universe”. The telescope will measure several billions of nearby galaxies, several hundreds of thousands of supernovae and it will be able to identify about 90% of solar system objects with diameters larger than 140 m. This astronomical telescope project is sometimes compared to particle physics experiments because of large amount of produced data (30 TB per night). The extreme data size, methods of data processing and distribution are issues similar to LHC experiments and possibly interesting for particle physics community.
Our group at the Institute of Physics is involved in testing of CCD chips for the LSST camera in collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in USA and with Laboratoire physique de nucléaire et des hautes énergies (LPNHE) in France.