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?