The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile has now been equipped with all three of its mirrors, plus a camera for good measure.
Last week’s installation of the telescope’s combined primary/tertiary mirror represented a major milestone in the observatory’s 15-year-long design and construction effort.
“We have a telescope!” the observatory team declared in updates posted to Instagram, Threads, BlueSky and X / Twitter.
The wide-field survey telescope, which is named after Microsoft software pioneer Charles Simonyi, is expected to shed light on astronomical mysteries ranging from the nature of dark energy and dark matter to the potential existence of an as-yet-unseen “Planet X” in the far reaches of our solar system.
The telescope’s 8.4-meter-wide (27.5-foot-wide) primary/tertiary mirror makes use of a continuous surface with different curvatures that are designed to optimize image resolution inside a relatively compact support structure. The 3.4-meter-wide (11-foot-wide) secondary mirror was installed in July.
When it’s fully up and running, the Simonyi Survey Telescope is expected to generate 20 terabytes of data every night. But the current version of the telescope isn’t yet ready for prime time.
“This iteration has the commissioning camera — a smaller 144-megapixel version of Rubin’s huge, 3,200-megapixel camera — which is used for testing and troubleshooting,” the observatory team noted. “Rubin’s LSST Camera, the biggest digital camera in the world that will #CaptureTheCosmos in science operations, will be installed early next year after our summit staff complete the next round of tests.”
