"The world's largest digital camera is to be used to keep an eye out for asteroids heading towards Earth. The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) has been built by researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab. At its heart is a 1.4 billion pixel (or 1400 megapixel) camera that will scan the night sky looking for rogue near-Earth objects from atop Mount Haleakala in Maui Island, Hawaii. The system an orthogonal transfer CCD to remove atmospheric blur from images."
Pan-STARRS is an innovative design for a wide-field imaging facility being developed at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy.
By combining relatively small mirrors with very large digital cameras we will be able to develop and deploy an economical observing system that will be able to observe the entire available sky several times each month.
The immediate goal of Pan-STARRS is to discover and characterize Earth-approaching objects, both asteroids & comets, that might pose a danger to our planet.
The huge volume of images produced by this system will provide valuable data for many other kinds of scientific programs.
The four PanSTARRS cameras will each be the largest digital cameras ever built. Each camera will have about 1.4 billion pixels spread over an area about 40 centimeters square. For comparison, a typical domestic digital camera contains about 5 million pixels on a chip a few millimeters across.
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1 comments:
I love digital camera !! They are wonderful!!
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