Vera C. Rubin Observatory Begins Its Long-Awaited All-Sky Survey

The telescope should spot billions of astronomical objects in the next 10 years.

One year ago, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first photos — tiny windows into millions of galaxies and thousands of asteroids captured with only 10 hours of test observations from a remote location on Chile’s Cerro Pachón mountain. That tantalizing morsel only piqued astronomers’ interest into the impending sky-sweeping abilities of the giant telescope. Now, they wait no longer.

This week, the observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) officially begins. Designed to survey the entire sky every three days in visible and near-infrared light, Rubin will capture an unprecedented time-lapse movie of the universe.

“It’s what I could only dream about 25 years ago,” says planetary scientist Mike Brown (Caltech). “If you talk to 50 different astronomers, you would get 50 different answers about what they are looking forward to.”

Over the past year, the Rubin team has been testing the telescope’s functionality, data quality, and consistency. The decision to start the LSST followed measures of Rubin’s image quality, effective survey speed, system uptime and reliability, and calibration accuracy, the team reports in a press release.

“I’m excited because we are finally beginning to start answering the questions that Rubin set out to provide answers to,” says cosmologist Arun Kannawadi Jayaraman (Duke University), who works with data from the Rubin Observatory. “And I’m nervous because, although we have been dealing with the immense amount of data Rubin Observatory has been generating during its Science Validation and Commissioning phase, it is now getting real.”

The $800 million observatory boasts the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope and the largest digital camera in the world, at three tons and 3,200 megapixels (more than 65 times sharper than the camera in the iPhone 17). Every 30 seconds, the observatory will take a photo before swiveling to spy a new section of the sky. Over the next 10 years, it will turn its eye to each point in the sky around 800 times.

Rubin will be especially useful for spotting transient objects like supernovae, as well as measuring the gradual expansion of the universe. Whenever the telescope detects an object that has moved, brightened, or dimmed, the observatory’s processing center at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will send out an alert. Astronomers estimate that up to 10 million alerts could occur every evening, some of which can direct researchers to follow up on dramatic astronomical events with other telescopes. “It