starts taking pictures of the night sky in a few years, its centerpiece 3,200 megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera will produce an enormous trove of data valuable to everyone from cosmologists to the people who track asteroids that might collide with Earth.
What you probably haven't read about is how researchers will get that mountain of incredibly detailed images off the back of the world's largest digital camera, down fiber optic cables and into the computers that will send them off Cerro Pachón in Chile and out into the world. At this point, two things need to happen. First, the data needs to get out of the cryostat, a high-vacuum, low-temperature and, Thayer says,"jam-packed" cavity that houses the focal plane and the surrounding electronics. Second, the data needs to be converted into optical signals for the fibers that go to the base of the camera.
Why fiber optics? Data inevitably fades into noise if you go far enough along a signal cable, and the cable here has to be long – around 150 meters, or 500 feet, to make it from the top of the telescope to the base.