The fastest camera in the world has just been created in Marseille

The LAM (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille – Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory) has developed the fastest and the world’s most sensitive astronomy camera that will form part of the Very Large Telescope (ESO, Chile) in 2011.  The camera is capable of taking 1500 images/second with extreme sensitivity, with almost no light. It introduces a new step in the control of adaptive optics, an absolutely innovative development that has successfully reconciled two contradictory concepts, namely speed and sensitivity, in an approximately 20 cm cubic box. Up to now, fast cameras required good lighting, but this often modified the conditions of the experiment. The LAM has successfully overcome this technological bottleneck, but it goes even further.  It is participating in the development of a very high sensitivity infrared imager in the “Rapid” project labelled by the Optitec competitiveness cluster.

LAM overcame this technological obstacle, but they did not stop there. In the project “Rapid” approved by the competitive cluster Optitec, LAM is involved in developing a highly-sensitive infrared imager.