If you’re looking for mechanical engineer Margaux Lopez ’11, look up—way up—to the summit of Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the Chilean Andes. There, almost 9,000 feet above the coastal town of La Serena, sits the newly constructed Vera Rubin Observatory, where Lopez toils to help reframe everything humankind believes it knows about the mysteries of the universe. 

That isn’t hyperbole. We’re talking enhanced knowledge about far-away galaxies and dark energy (the enigmatic “something” that drives the universe’s accelerating rate of expansion); the discovery of new asteroids, comets, stars, and exploding supernovas; and the most complete map of the Milky Way that has ever been created. 

“This thing is legitimately going to revolutionize astronomy,” Lopez says. The “thing” in question is the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, the game-changing, car-sized digital camera which, in March, was affixed to the observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope. For the next decade, the LSST will repeatedly scan and photograph the southern night sky, resulting in an ultra-wide, ultra-high-def time-lapse record of the universe—the greatest movie about the universe ever produced. 

The 3,200-megapixel, 6,700-pound beast of a machine was built at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Lopez, a SLAC engineer, began on the project at 21 as her first engineering gig. As a member of the LSST integration and test team for the last decade, she has worked on everything from troubleshooting how to keep the extremely temperature-sensitive camera sensors cool by constructing coolant lines that climb the length of the telescope to where the LSST camera is mounted; to developing robotic tools to put together the camera, which had high-level assembly requirements; and performing what she calls “pathfinding” on a test version of the camera she helped build to ensure that when the real deal showed up in the Andes, it worked. 

Perhaps as daunting as those objectives were the logistics Lopez was tasked with: safely packing and shipping a car-sized camera—with a $168 million price tag—from California to Chile. 

“I started planning shipment in 2019,” Lopez says of the LSST, which arrived in Chile in 2024. “We chartered a 747 and added 50 metric tons of support equipment. I was in charge of all of this: talking to the trucking company, the airline, the people doing the loading, the people packing. That was a wild process: how do you get a fully built instrument from the U.S. to Chile on a custom vibration isolation system with custom procedures to get it in and out of the container, and to control the process of loading and unloading the plane? It was a lot of pressure.” 

So, too, was getting the LSST from the maintenance area in the observatory where it was lying in wait to get hitched to the telescope, a feat possible thanks to a sophisticated lift system. 

“Finding anything interesting in space is really hard,” Lopez says. “The universe is huge and interesting, so if you have a small field of view, the chances that you [find] something are pretty low. It’s a needle in a haystack problem. Our solution is to gather millions and millions of haystacks of data.” 

In its first year, Lopez says the LSST will collect more data than every other telescope in history has ever collected … combined. “We’re going to be doing that for 10 years,” she says. She cites the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which operated out of New Mexico’s Apache Point Observatory. “That survey took 20 terabytes of data in 10 years,” she says. “We are taking 20 terabytes of data per night.” 

Ever the St. Andrean, one of the aspects of LSST Lopez is most excited about is access. “I think it’s very cool that this data will be more open for access than most other observatories,” she says. 

The data will be available to professional astronomers and students affiliated with institutions in the U.S., Chile, and other international programs, then become fully public after a two-year proprietary period. 

LSST’s “First Light”—the first evening of scanning—is scheduled for July 4. “There’s this interesting vibe at the observatory right now where all the engineers are saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we are so excited for this thing to be done,’ and all the astronomers are saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we are so excited for this project to start,’” Lopez says, laughing. 

Lopez, who moved to Chile in 2020 but in 2023 moved back to the States, will visit Vera Rubin for repairs once the camera is fully operational. 

When she thinks about her first few months in Chile, she thinks about St. Andrew’s. “It’s hard to move to a new country, by yourself, and not speak the language,” she says. “But the confidence St. Andrew’s created in me, this sense of independence and the ability to exist on my own and create community, helped.” 

She also spent time reflecting on her Senior Exhibition, which she did on Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits. “The book never specifically mentions Chile, but the events mirror the country’s dictatorship past. When I got here, I was like, ‘Wow, this thing that I spent a long time thinking about at St. Andrew’s happened in a real place, and that place is Chile, and there are museum exhibits and stories about it.’” 

The LSST project itself mirrors the intellectual curiosity St. Andrew’s urges. “Essentially this is a project about curiosity,” Lopez says. “Humans have always wanted to travel to the highest mountain, go across the ocean, know more. This is the modern-day frontier, and I can’t wait to see what it discovers.”

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the Spring issue of St. Andrew’s Magazine in a story called “Making Their Mark: A Sampling of St. Andrew’s Women who have Transformed their Spaces.” If you enjoyed the story above, read its “sister” stories here.