14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists are now hard at work designing and putting together the absolute coolest camera the world has ever seen. This machinery is so super high-tech that they're not even calling it a camera. They're calling it the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI, for short).
Should things go as planned, DESI will be completed sometime in 2018. It will be added to the Mayall telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, US, and should remain operational for about 5 years.
During this time, the camera will serve to study the light produced by galaxies that populate the universe, and based on the properties of this light, it is to establish the distance between our planet and the cosmic systems that emitted it.
The researchers behind this project expect that between the years 2018 and 2023 the camera will study as many as 30 million galaxies and use whatever information it obtains to create a three-dimensional map of the fragment of the universe that holds them.
“DESI will create a high-definition, 3D map of a swath of the universe going back 10 billion light-years,” explain scientists at the University of Michigan, not long ago entrusted with building several of the camera's components.
Based on the map delivered by DESI, researchers expect to gain a better understanding of the evolution of the universe, maybe even shed new light on how constant interactions between gravity and dark energy are shaping the cosmos.