Nuts and Volts - April 2015

World's Largest Digital Camera Funded

If you are in the market for a great pro-level digital camera, you might take a look at the Nikon D4: a 16. 2 MP unit that lists for

$5,999.99 (plus lenses). It's pretty impressive, but how about a

3,200 MP camera — the final cost of which has been estimated at about $167 million? We're talking about the centerpiece of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) which recently received key "Critical Decision 2" approval from the US Department of Energy. The camera — scheduled to be in operation atop a mountain in Cerro Pachón, Chile, by 2022 — will be the size of a small car and weigh more than three tons.

Operated by the DOE's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and National Accelerator Laboratory ( www6.slac.stanford.edu), it is designed to help researchers study galaxy formation, track hazardous asteroids, grab a look at exploding stars, and gain a better understanding of enigmatic dark matter and dark energy which together make up 95 percent of the universe. According to SLAC, it will produce the widest, deepest, and fastest views of the night sky ever observed. Over a ten year period, the observatory will detect tens of billions of objects and create movies of the sky with unprecedented details.

"The telescope is a key part of the long-term strategy to study dark energy and other scientific topics in the United States and elsewhere," said David MacFarlane, SLAC's director of particle physics and astrophysics. "SLAC places high priority on the successful development and construction of the LSST camera and is very pleased that the project has achieved this major approval milestone."

Components of the camera will be built by an international collaboration of labs and universities, including DOE's Brookhaven National Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and SLAC itself, where the camera will be assembled and tested.

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ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY Levitation Made Simple

Levitation has long been a staple concept for folks, ranging from Hindu gurus to magicians. It is a pretty difficult thing to achieve outside the world of illusion and fakery, but there are a few real methods including magnetic and acoustic levitation — the latter of which is used for "containerless processing" of various materials. It involves suspending an object between a sound source and a reflector using the reflected acoustic waves.

Until recently, this has required a very precise setup in which the source and reflector had to be located at fixed resonant distances, which makes it difficult to control the levitated objects. However, researchers with the University of São Paulo ( www5.usp.br) have devised an instrument that can make a small object hover while exercising much greater control over it.

The instrument demonstrates that it is possible to build a practical nonresonant device, i.e., one that does not require a fixed separation between the two main components. Moreover, it shows that levitation can do more than just trap objects in a fixed position; it can also transport them through short distances in space. According to Marco Aurélio Brizzotti Andrade, who led the research, "Modern factories have hundreds of robots to move parts from one place to another. Why not try to do the same without touching the parts to be transported?"

Unfortunately, his levitator can lift only very light objects at this point; it was tested with 3 mm blobs of polystyrene. "The next step is to improve the device to levitate heavier materials," Andrade noted. ▲