Not well shared: The Vera Rubin camera is in Chile, on-mountain. There was a fair amount of coverage of the LSSTCam’s completion, at Stanford’s SLAC lab, in April. But with little fanfare, the pre-ship review passed, the camera was packed and transported, and finally trucked up the side of Cerro Pachon in the Atacama Desert, north Chile. This may be a bit in vein with the JWST shipment: since the James Webb telescope was a multibillion-dollar symbol of US prowess, a Navy warship was sent to shadow it. Can’t let some hothead take a shot at it, and score instant, lasting infamy. Of course, LSSTCam is not on the scale of JWST, but neither was there a guided-missile destroyer along for the ride.
Arrival of LSSTCam means all the major elements are now on-peak. The remaining observatory items before first light are now minor construction elements, mirror and camera integration, and extensive testing. The program already planned a basic instrument, ComCam (Commissioning Camera), to shake out the system before LSSTCam. When a world-leading instrument arrives after any such shipping, it must be thoroughly checked out before anything else: must be sure nothing happened to it, as it’s a one-of-a-kind, custom handbuilt job, and in the literal sense irreplaceable. This same logic means the primary mirror (there’s only one “factory” that can make it, and even so it was a unique build) has a dummy mirror, made of steel, to test the telescope, the observatory, handling procedures, etc.
Checkout of the telescope- using the ComCam- will take place through the summer. The LSSTCam will be mounted and see first light- here, first ‘engineering light’- in late-2024. Assuming no showstoppers are found, or even serious rework items, first science light is scheduled for early-2025. Photons ahoy!