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Rubin Observatory throws a party to reveal first pictures

Long-exposure image of Rubin Observatory against night sky filled with star trails
A long-exposure image shows the Rubin Observatory beneath star trails. (Credit: Hernan Stockebrand via Rubin Observatory)

After more than 20 years of planning and construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready for its grand opening, and the world is invited.

The observatory in the foothills of the Chilean Andes features a monster of a telescope, with an 8.4-meter-wide (28-foot-wide) mirror, coupled with what’s said to be the world’s largest digital camera.

It will survey the night sky every night for at least 10 years, producing about 20 trillion bytes of data every 24 hours. It would take you more than three years of watching Netflix, or over 50 years of listening to Spotify, to use that amount of data, according to the Rubin team.

The first images and videos are due to be unveiled on June 23, during a “First Look” webcast that will be shared online and at more than 300 in-person watch parties across the globe.

What will the images look like? Mario Juric knows, but he isn’t telling.

“I cannot tell you what’s on them, but I can tell you we just finished them, and they look amazing,” Juric, a member of the Rubin team and the director of the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute, says on the Fiction Science podcast. “I did not spend a day doing what I was supposed to be doing, because I just spent it browsing through the images. … I could teach an entire class by just zooming in on different parts of this image and explaining what this object is.”

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Software predicts a bonanza of solar system discoveries

Visualization of Rubin Observatory's solar system observations
A computer visualization maps small bodies in the solar system that are expected to be observed by the Rubin Observatory during its 10-year sky survey. Red indicates near-Earth objects, gold indicates main-belt asteroids, light purple indicates Jupiter Trojan asteroids, and deep blue indicates trans-Neptunian objects. The left image looks down from above the ecliptic plane, and the right image provides a side view. (Credit: Kurlander et al. / Sorcha.space / Univ. of Washington)

A new type of computer simulation predicts that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will discover millions of previously undetected objects in the solar system over the course of the coming decade.

The discovery campaign, which is due to begin in earnest later this year, should expand the known small-body populations in the solar system by a factor of four to nine, said University of Washington astronomer Mario Juric, a member of the research team behind the open-source Sorcha simulation software.

“With this data, we’ll be able to update the textbooks of solar system formation and vastly improve our ability to spot — and potentially deflect — the asteroids that could threaten Earth,” Juric said today in a news release.

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Astronomers process test images at Rubin Observatory

Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera
The Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera is the size of a small car. (Credit: Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / NSF / DOE / AURA / F. Munoz)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun generating test images of the night sky, thanks to the Simonyi Survey Telescope and its giant camera as well as a data management team that includes scientists from the University of Washington.

Team members started taking on-sky engineering data with Rubin’s LSST Camera on April 15, according to an update posted to an online forum for the Rubin Observatory research community by Keith Bechtol, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“The Data Management system successfully transported and processed the 3-gigapixel images at the US Data Facility within about a minute of acquisition,” Bechtol wrote. “The distributed Rubin team was jubilant, taking a few moments to celebrate the first few data acquisitions, and then quickly got back to work.”

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Rubin Observatory’s monster telescope takes shape

Rubin Observatory telescope mount assembly
The Simonyi Survey Telescope now has its mirrors and a camera in place. (Credit: Rubin Observatory)

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.”

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Get a wide-angle view of the Simonyi Survey Telescope

Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Rubin Observatory
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope will make use of an 8.4-meter primary mirror and an 3.5-meter secondary mirror. Note the size of the support structure compared with the size of the workers on the platform. (Credit: Rubin Observatory / NSF / AURA / F. Munoz Arancibia)

Hubble. Webb. Chandra. Spitzer. Rubin. Roman. And now, Simonyi.

With the ramping up of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi joins a select group of scientists and technologists, policymakers and philanthropists who have had world-class telescopes and observatories named after them.

But here’s the thing: Technically speaking, the Simonyi Survey Telescope isn’t named after Charles Simonyi alone.

“The idea was to create something that carries the family name, and I was more thinking about my dad, Simonyi Károly,” Charles Simonyi told GeekWire, using the Hungarian manner of speech for personal names. “He was a professor at Budapest University. He wrote a wonderful book called ‘The Cultural History of Physics,’ which is available now in English at Amazon.”

Simonyi said his father was best-known for his work in popularizing science, “to make science understandable to the great public.” The physicist’s son arguably had an even greater impact on our computer-centric society by taking a leading role in creating Word, Excel and other tools for Microsoft’s Office suite of applications back in the 1980s. Four decades later, Word is still the world’s most widely used word processing software, and Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet.

Now the Simonyi Survey Telescope promises to have a similarly transformative and long-lasting impact on astronomy. Built at the Rubin Observatory on the edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, the telescope will survey the full sky every three nights, generating about 20 terabytes of raw data daily.

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Asteroid-hunting algorithm passes a tricky test

Bird's eye view showing orbital paths for Earth and asteroid 2022 SF289 at closest approach
A bird’s-eye view of the solar system shows the orbital path for Earth in blue and the projected orbit for the asteroid known as 2022 SF289 at its closest approach in green. Orbits of Venus and Mars are shown in orange and red. (Credit: Joachim Moeyens / UW / OpenSpace)

A new technique for finding potentially hazardous asteroids before they find us has chalked up its first success.

In this case, the asteroid isn’t expected to threaten Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. But the fact that the technique — which uses a new computer algorithm called HelioLinc3D — actually works comes as a confidence boost as astronomers get set to step up the asteroid hunt with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

The University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute will play a leading role in analyzing the data from the Rubin Observatory, and HelioLinc3D is meant to make the job easier.

It’ll be another couple of years before the Rubin Observatory starts surveying the skies, but researchers put HelioLinc3D to the test by feeding it data from the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS.

During the July 18 test run, the algorithm combined fragments of ATLAS data from four nights of observations to identify an asteroid that had been previously missed.

The asteroid, designated 2022 SF289 and described in a Minor Planet Electronic Circular, is thought to be about 600 feet wide. That’s wide enough to cause widespread destruction on Earth in the event of an impact. The good news is that projections of 2022 SF289’s orbital path show it staying 140,000 miles away from Earth at its closest. Nevertheless, the space rock fits NASA’s definition of a potentially hazardous asteroid because of its estimated size and the fact that it can come within 5 million miles of our planet.

UW researcher Ari Heinze, the principal developer of HelioLinc3D, said the algorithm’s success should carry over to the Rubin Observatory’s future database.

“By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” Heinze said in a news release.

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Asteroid Day serves as a teachable moment

DART spacecraft
An artist’s conception shows the spacecraft for NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test approaching its target. (NASA / JHUAPL Illustration)

Today’s 112th anniversary of a close brush with a cosmic catastrophe serves as a teachable moment about the perils and prospects posed by near-Earth asteroids.

Asteroid Day is timed to commemorate a blast from space that occurred over a Siberian forest back on June 30, 1908. The explosion, thought to have been caused by the breakup of an asteroid or comet, wiped out millions of acres of trees — but because the area was so remote, the death toll was minimal.

Because of the Tunguska blast and more recent close calls, such as the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor blast, the threat from above is being taken more seriously. And although a Seattle-area asteroid mining venture called Planetary Resources fizzled, experts say the idea of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids is worth taking seriously as well.

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Telescope project honors astronomer and billionaire

LSST
Artwork shows the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope scanning the sky. (LSST Illustration)

The next great ground-based astronomical observatory, previously known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, has been named after the late astronomer Vera Rubin — with a nod to Seattle software billionaire Charles Simonyi as well.

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DIRAC Institute plans big-data astronomy

LSST
Artwork shows the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope scanning the night sky in Chile. (LSST Illustration)

A new data analysis center for what’s expected to be torrents of astronomical imagery is taking shape at the University of Washington.

Thanks to contributions from software billionaire Charles Simonyi and other donors, researchers at the Astronomy Department’s DIRAC Institute are getting ready to crunch data from two wide-angle telescope surveys.

The first survey is the Palomar Observatory’s Zwicky Transient Facility, which is due to begin operations in August and will scan the entire accessible sky every night for supernovae and other cosmic outbursts.

The DIRAC Institute will also manage the development of analytical tools for the almost real-time processing of images from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a massive observatory that’s scheduled to start scanning the skies over Chile in 2019.

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