![]() The massive telescope, funded by the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, is named after astronomer Vera Rubin. The Rubin team will release this data to the scientific community-which includes some 10,000 users-as soon as the images are processed, and they'll send out nightly alerts about objects that move or vary in brightness, so others can track the trajectories of nearby asteroids, for example. Rubin will also go deeper and chart more of the cosmos than its predecessors, like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Dark Energy Survey. Instead, Rubin will repeatedly scan the entire southern sky-about 18,000 square degrees-collecting data on every viewable object and imaging each area 825 times at a range of optical wavelengths. ![]() It’s the opposite of the approach used for the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes, which zoom in to capture spectacular images of narrow slices of the heavens. ![]() Such a gigantic cosmic database would’ve been unthinkable until very recently. They’ll also amass images of 6 million asteroids and other objects in our solar system. With it, scientists will build a vast map of the sky as seen from the southern hemisphere, including 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars in the Milky Way-a significant fraction of all galaxies in the universe and of all stars in our own galaxy, Roodman says. That’s when the telescope will begin collecting 20 terabytes of data every night for 10 years. Scientists will conduct the telescope’s first imaging tests in the second half of 2023, and they're aiming for Rubin’s official debut, called “first light,” in March 2024. He mentions that both the 5.5-foot lens, which comes with its own extra-large lens cap, and the focal plane are in the Guinness Book of World Records because of their extraordinary size.Įngineers will test the camera in about two months, and in May the team will put it on a chartered flight to the telescope’s site in the desert mountains of northern Chile. “In the combination of the camera’s giant focal plane and a 25-foot mirror to collect light, we are unparalleled,” says Aaron Roodman, an astrophysicist at SLAC and deputy director of the Rubin Observatory. At the end of September, scientists and technicians working in an enormous clean room at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, finished assembling the sensitive camera’s mechanical components, and they are now moving ahead to its final pre-installation tests. Rubin Observatory’s telescope, which has been in the works for about two decades but is nearly complete. That camera will be the workhorse for the Vera C. (A gigapixel is equivalent to 1,000 megapixels.) While a very powerful personal camera might have megapixel resolution, astronomers have constructed a device that will image the distant universe with 3.2 gigapixel resolution. The world’s biggest digital camera is finally coming into focus. ![]()
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