In Its First Year, Rubin Observatory Will Gather More Space Data Than All Other Telescopes In History Combined
Every year, all telescopes on Earth and in space combined discover around 20,000 new asteroids. In just its first ten hours of activity, a single new observatory discovered 2,104 asteroids, or in other words, it did 10% of the entire astronomical community's annual job in less than half a day. Yeah, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, is pretty cool.
In development since the 1990s, the Rubin Observatory is a joint operation between the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and NSF NOIRLab. Nestled in the mountains of Chile far from any light pollution, it houses the Simonyi Survey Telescope, which has three mirrors, two of which are actually combined together on a single substrate for a width of 8.4 meters.
This is all to get the light of the cosmos to the camera, which has three lenses, the largest being 1.6 meters wide. That makes for the single largest digital camera ever built, about the size of a car and weighing 6,000 pounds. An iPhone Pro has a 48-megapixel camera, Rubin's is 3,200.
Its ten-year mission is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), so no shortage of ambition, then. In that time, the observatory is hoping to gather data about the universe. A lot of data. As in, about 20 terabytes per night, ending up somewhere in the neighborhood of about 500 petabytes, or more data than humanity has ever written down, in any language, anywhere, ever. The hope is that by the end of its first year of operation, it will have gathered more space data than all other optical observatories, ever, combined. Feeling small yet?
The depths of space and time
So, you've got the best camera of all time. What should you do with it? The LSST plans to take a thousand pictures of the Southern sky every night, mapping the full thing about every three to four days. That will eventually give science the greatest time-lapse night photography ever done, at a level of detail that defies belief. For instance, in all of history humanity has discovered around one million asteroids and comets, and it took every single astronomer looking through every single telescope to do that. By the end of its ten-year LSST mission, the hope is that Rubin will have found a further four million.
But Rubin's got much bigger plans than finding a couple of orbiting space rocks. One of its major goals is to explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy, strange phenomena that make up over 95% of the universe even though we can barely detect them. The main way we even know dark energy exists is because galaxies appear to be accelerating away from one another, which can't otherwise be explained. Having an insanely detailed time-lapse composite photo of every visible galaxy over ten years sure would help understand that.
That's what Rubin is planning to do. But when you point a camera at the deepest depths, you might just find something you didn't expect. Scientists are excited by what Rubin might find that no one was even looking for — or knew existed in the first place. Rubin might even catch a few more interstellar visitors, which we humans only first started noticing in 2017.
How to interact with Rubin yourself
Beyond simply releasing Rubin's pictures to the public, the team running the observatory of created a few other ways of interacting with the telescope's findings. The Skyviewer app can take you on a guided tour of the cosmos through Rubin's pictures, or let you navigate around freely like you're captain of your own starship. Wish you could explore all that with more than just your eyeballs? Don't worry, Skyviewer can let you use your ears, too, to listen to music of the spheres. I may be listening to it as I write this.
As acting director of DOE's Office of Science Harriet Kung said, "NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory reflects what's possible when the federal government backs world-class engineers and scientists with the tools to lead." That's true! Sounds like the federal government should actually do some of that, instead of, you know, slashing science budgets left and right.
