Overview
- The Rubin Observatory, which officially began full survey operations on June 30, 2026, has moved from commissioning into the decade‑long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) with nightly observing planned for ten years.
- The 8.4‑meter Simonyi Survey Telescope carries a 3,200‑megapixel camera that takes a new exposure about every 40 seconds, producing roughly 10 terabytes of raw data per night and triggering up to millions of automated alerts when things change in the sky.
- The project activated its Alert Production Pipeline in February 2026 and early operations already yielded more than 11,000 previously unreported asteroids, including 33 near‑Earth objects and hundreds of trans‑Neptunian objects, demonstrating rapid discovery at scale.
- LSST data and alerts are being routed through broker systems and public data releases so researchers worldwide can access images, measurements, and near‑real‑time notifications for follow‑up studies.
- Over the decade the survey will repeatedly image each field hundreds of times to build a dataset of billions of stars and galaxies for studies of dark matter, dark energy, transient events, and solar‑system mapping, while driving large computing and community science efforts that broaden participation in discovery.