According to computerworld, the world’s largest digital camera is being designed to be installed in a ground telescope on a mountain in northern Chile.

The camera is about the size of a compact car, and will capture images images at 3.2 gigapixel resolution from its vantage point 8,900-feet above sea level. The project is supported largely by the US Department of Energy and to some extent by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Department of Energy (DOE) approved the construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) on August 1, 2014, but the project really began on April 14, 2015 when it was first suggested. Currently, the camera is being assembled in a SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s facility in Menlo Park, California.

The LSST is estimated to be completed by 2022. The objective of this construction is a survey of the southern sky and the capture of high resolution images of the most distant galaxies. Scientists anticipate that the telescope will assist in the identification of more galaxies than there are people on Earth before the end of a decade of operation.

The LSST’s camera will also be capable of producing videos of the night sky in great detail. One drawback is that the storage space is required to be large as the telescope, and it will have to deliver 6 million Gigabytes of data each year. Additionally, a single image captured by the 3.2 gigapixel camera would require 1,500 HDTV screens to be appropriately displayed.