Overview
- The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which officially began the Legacy Survey of Space and Time on June 30, 2026, has moved into routine 10‑year survey operations from Cerro Pachón and is producing nightly science data and alerts.
- Rubin pairs an 8.4‑meter Simonyi Survey Telescope with a 3,200‑megapixel camera that takes a new image every 30–40 seconds, generating about 10 terabytes of raw data each night.
- The observatory’s Alert Production Pipeline has been tested at large scale and can send hundreds of thousands to millions of notifications per night, with early broker tests delivering roughly 800,000 alerts in a single run.
- Commissioning and early operations already discovered more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, including near‑Earth and distant trans‑Neptunian objects, showing the survey’s power for solar‑system mapping.
- Rubin will produce public data releases and a global broker ecosystem supported by software partners such as the University of Washington, and its decade of repeated imaging is expected to enable transient follow‑ups and meaningful tests of dark‑energy models after several years of data collection.