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Hundreds of fibers, arranged by hand, capture light at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s New Mexico telescope.
DAN LONG/APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY
Astronomy surveys aim to up the pace with army of tiny robots
Feb. 3, 2021 , 3:25 PM
It was one of the stranger and more monotonous jobs in astronomy: plugging optical fibers into hundreds of holes in aluminum plates. Every day, technicians with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) prepped up to 10 plates that would be placed that night at the focus of the survey’s telescopes in Chile and New Mexico. The holes matched the exact positions of stars, galaxies, or other bright objects in the telescopes’ view. Light from each object fell directly on a fiber and was whisked off to a spectrograph, which split the light into its component wavelengths, revealing key details such as what the object is made of and how it is moving.