Funding has been secured to construct what will be the world's most powerful digital camera. Weighing in at more than three tons—around the same size as a small car—and packing a 32,000-megapixel punch, the camera will capture high-res images and video of our cosmos.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope camera, or LSST for short, will be constructed at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with operations set to begin in 2022. The goal is to take digital images of the entire visible southern sky from atop Cerro Pachon mountain in Chile.

The camera is expected to snap up the "widest, deepest and fastest views of the night sky ever observed" over a ten-year time span. This will be the first time a telescope will catalogue more objects in the universe than there are humans on Earth. In other words, this device will spy out tens of billions of objects and produce films of the sky in crystal clear imagery.

"The telescope is a key part of the long-term strategy to study dark energy and other scientific topics in the United States and elsewhere," said David MacFarlane, SLAC's director of particle physics and astrophysics.

Once the LSST turns its lens on to the sky, it is expected to generate a massive public archive of data: roughly six million gigabytes per year. Researchers hope to use it to get to grips with the formation of galaxies, track potentially dangerous asteroids, and observe exploding stars. They also think that the camera will allow them to unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of our universe.

This story first appeared on Wired UK.