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Vera C. Rubin Observatory Starts 10-Year Legacy Survey of Space and Time
The facility in Chile began the decade-long project after one year of testing and calibration. It will collect 10 terabytes of data nightly across hundreds of wide-field images of the southern sky.
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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun the Legacy Survey of Space and Time after one year of testing and calibration. The 10-year survey will collect about 10 terabytes of data each night through hundreds of high-resolution images.
Each image covers an area roughly 40 times the size of the full moon. The completed survey will map nearly the entire sky visible from the southern hemisphere. The observatory has already started issuing alerts on changes in the night sky, including supernovae and the movements of asteroids and comets.
Those alerts have produced the discovery of more than 11,000 new asteroids. An early-release image shows a field of stars, interstellar gas, and distant galaxies in the constellation Lupus. The survey will generate repeated deep images over 10 years to support studies of rare cosmic events and phenomena such as dark matter and dark energy.
“Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” said Brian Stone of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
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