THE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to begin its mission to scan the entire southern sky every three nights for nearly a decade. These images will form the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, transforming our view of any object that twinkles or changes in the night sky.
“I think people will be amazed at just the sheer number of stars and galaxies that are in these images,” says at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
The facility is built on Chile’s Cerro PachÓn mountain and houses the Simonyi Survey Telescope. The telescope’s systems have already undergone extensive testing over the past several years. These include cooling equipment that will keep the camera at -100°C (-150°F), powerful motors that are able to point the approximately 300-tonne telescope anywhere in under 4 seconds (in order to capture fast-changing objects) and computers capable of handling the more than 15 terabytes of data that will be produced each night.
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“Taking these very deep, high-quality images of the night sky very rapidly stresses all of our technology,” says Bechtol.
Once each system has been carefully checked, Bechtol and his colleagues will begin the commissioning phase in July, when they will try out the telescope’s picture-taking abilities with a smaller test camera rather than its 3.2-gigapixel main camera. “Even though it’s only about 5 per cent of the size of the full camera, its ability to map the sky is comparable to many existing state-of-the-art telescopes,” says Bechtol.
The first images taken by this camera will be intentionally blurry, so that Bechtol and his team can learn how to properly focus the telescope’s optics. Once they are confident the telescope is performing well, they will take focused photos of high enough quality that astronomers can start using them for research, though there isn’t a definitive date for when this will happen, says Bechtol.
Around August, the researchers will install the full-sized camera, which they plan to start taking pictures with in December. These images will be unlike those taken from any other telescope, says Bechtol. Scientists will be hit with a torrent of astronomical data almost immediately.
“The quality of the data, its variety and its size and the data rate – astronomers have never dealt with that before,” says at the University of Cambridge.
Assuming that astronomers aren’t completely overwhelmed, we could start learning new things about the universe right away, she says, just as the James Webb Space Telescope quickly began making discoveries when it started operations in 2022.
“Once it starts taking data, then for discoveries I expect it to be pretty rapid, just because it opens up this new discovery space that’s never been explored before,” says Peiris.
