Feat of optics: Vera C. Rubin Observatory telescope’s final optical component is in place

A journey of scientific planning, design, engineering, and precision that began back in the 1990s has led to this moment: the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile is poised to unleash a thrilling feat of science this year when the world’s largest digital camera—think car size (it weighs more than 300 kilograms)—on the Simonyi Survey Telescope gets first light and captures its “first look images.”

Light from explosions of dying stars allows scientists to measure cosmic distances to study dark energy’s effect on the Universe’s expansion, and Rubin Observatory’s goal is to explore how and when the Universe formed.

The 3200-megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera is the heart of the optical system, and was built at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It also features an 8.4-meter combined primary/tertiary mirror and a 3.5-meter secondary mirror made of glass by Corning Advanced Optics and polished by L3Harris Technologies.

Rubin Observatory is designed to capture even the faintest objects and others that change in position or brightness within its wide field of view. Its LSST Camera will repeatedly scan the southern night sky—covering the entire hemisphere every few nights—for 10 years to create an ultrawide, ultrahigh time-lapse record of the Universe to attempt to unveil the mysteries of asteroids, comets, pulsating stars, and supernovae.

How big are its images? The images it produces are so large and detailed it would require a wall of 400 ultrahigh-def TV screens to display just one.

Each night, Rubin Observatory will image billions of stars and galaxies to capture 20 terabytes of data and send out ~10 million alerts. It’s significantly more alerts than any other telescope, so scientists had to create a new way to deal with the massive incoming datasets. Seven community software systems will process the alerts before sending them along to scientists around the globe.

Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science—cooperatively operated by NSF NOIRLab and DOE’s SLAC.

This is an amazing moment for optics—unleashing a new era in astronomy and astrophysics. Congrats to everyone involved. Science matters. Science funding matters.