Journey to transport the worlds largest camera to the top of a mountain over 2,700m high

The three-ton digital camera was transported by plane and truck from its manufacturing site at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California to its safe location atop the 9,000-foot Cerro Pachón mountain in the Chilean Andes.

The camera being transported is the centerpiece camera of the newly completed Vera C. Rubin Observatory after two decades of development. It is the final major part of the Rubin Observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope.

Weighing 3 tons and measuring 1.5 meters wide, the camera is the largest ever built for astronomy. It cost $168 million. To minimize risk to the instrument, scientists and engineers conducted a dress rehearsal in 2021 while transporting a replica of the same mass to Chile. All the conditions the real camera would experience during the journey were recorded as the replica was transported.

Margaux Lopez, a mechanical engineer at SLAC who planned the camera’s transport, shared that transporting a sophisticated piece of equipment that took 10 years to assemble, over a 10-hour flight and up a winding dirt road up a mountain, was extremely difficult and risky. But thanks to the experience and data from the test transport, we were confident that we could keep the camera safe.

On May 14, the camera was transported to San Francisco airport for a 10-hour flight to Chile on a Boeing 747 cargo plane. The equipment and a convoy of nine trucks then began a five-hour journey up a winding 35-kilometer dirt road to the summit of the mountain, which is more than 9,000 feet above sea level.

Initial indicators, including information collected by data loggers, accelerometers and shock sensors, suggest they were successful.

The Rubin Observatory will launch later this year with a mission to take panoramic images of the southern sky every few nights, helping to create a "Legacy Survey of Space and Time" catalog of some 37 billion objects that will help astronomers study the universe.