Overview
- The Vera C. Rubin Observatory officially began the LSST on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, and has moved into nightly science operations from its site on Cerro Pachón in Chile.
- The facility uses a 3,200‑megapixel camera on an 8.4‑meter telescope to take a new exposure every 30 to 40 seconds, revisiting each patch of the southern sky roughly 800 times over the decade.
- Rubin is producing about 10 terabytes of imaging data per night and will feed real‑time Alert Production Pipeline messages to broker systems that can produce up to millions of alerts each night.
- Commissioning already yielded more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, including dozens of near‑Earth objects and hundreds of trans‑Neptunian objects, showing immediate value for solar‑system science and planetary defence.
- The project is run by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC with NSF and DOE funding, delivers public data releases and software tools developed by partners such as the University of Washington, and is expected to create a final archive of billions of objects and trillions of measurements.