About the Speaker: 

Steven Bellavia is an amateur astronomer and telescope maker. He is an aerospace engineer who worked for Grumman Aerospace with the Thermodynamics Group of the Space Division. He had a key role in developing a nuclear rocket engine, and performed the analysis, design and fabrication of the micro-gravity liquid droplet radiator that flew on Space Shuttle mission STS-029.

Steve has been at Brookhaven National Laboratory since 1992 and was the principal mechanical engineer for the camera on the Vera Rubin (formerly called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LSST). Prior to that, he was doing research and engineering for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory.

Steve has been recognized for the discovery of the Clair Obscure effect "Lunar L", which is described in the December 2018 issue of Astronomy magazine.

Steve is an assistant adjunct professor of astronomy and physics at Suffolk County Community College and the Astronomy Education and Outreach Coordinator at the Custer Institute and Observatory in Southold, New York.

About the talk: 

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which uses the largest and most sophisticated astronomy camera ever built, will conduct a 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to answer some of the most pressing questions about the structure and evolution of the universe and the objects in it.

his talk will discuss the design, construction and use of the world's largest digital camera, the heart of the Vera Rubin Telescope (formerly called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), and present the recently acquired engineering data during First Light/First Look.

The Rubin will rapidly scan the sky, using its 8.4 meter aperture optical telescope and 3.2 Gigapixel camera, designed to survey the visible sky every week down to a much fainter level than that reached by existing surveys. It will catalog 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than 300 meters and assess the threat they pose to life on Earth. It will find some 10,000 primitive objects in the Kuiper Belt, which contains a fossil record of the formation of the solar system. It will also contribute to the study of the structure of the universe by observing thousands of supernovae, both nearby and at large redshift. It will measure the distribution of dark matter through gravitational lensing. The images from LSST will be used to examine billions of remote galaxies, providing multiple probes of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.