A ten-year survey of the southern sky has begun in Chile using the world’s largest digital camera. Its first image was captured at the Vera Rubin Observatory on the night of July 1, 2026. Every night, the observatory will record anything that changes in brightness or position—from asteroids in the Solar System to supernovae at the other end of the universe.
Mirror and camera
The observatory’s centerpiece is the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope, according to Universe Today. It directs light onto the LSST camera, which has a resolution of 3.2 billion pixels—equivalent to approximately 380 4K images combined into a single image.
A single frame covers an area of the sky approximately 45 times larger than the disk of the full Moon. Thanks to this wide field of view, a significant portion of the available to him southern hemisphere can be covered in a single night of observations. The camera captures a new frame every 40 seconds through one of six optical filters in the range from 320 to 1,050 nanometers.
A week of operation of the LSST camera at the Vera Rubin Observatory in a time-lapse animation. Source: NOIRLabAstro
11,000 Asteroids Detected During Test Mode
Even before the official launch, during commissioning, the camera managed to detect 11,000 previously unknown asteroids. Among them are 33 near-Earth objects, as well as 380 objects beyond Neptune’s orbit.
This is the result of just the first month and a half of test observations. The U.S. Congress has set a goal of identifying 90% of all near-Earth objects, and the team estimates that continuing the survey for 12 years will make it possible to achieve this goal.
Dark matter through a lens
The LSST’s primary scientific objectives concern the nature of dark matter and dark energy. That is why the observatory was named after Vera Rubin, who, in the 1970s, provided the first convincing evidence of the existence of dark matter by analyzing the rotation of galaxies.
This substance makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe and remains invisible to direct observation, so the survey will detect its influence through the faint gravitational lensing of billions of distant galaxies. At the same time, astronomers are compiling a detailed catalog of objects that cross Earth’s orbit.
Data Scale
Every night, the system will generate about 20 terabytes of raw images, and over the course of a decade, the total volume of processed data will reach 500 petabytes. This is more than the combined volume of data collected by all previous astronomical surveys put together.
The software will also generate up to 10 million automated alerts per night about any changes in the sky. Researchers from any country will be able to subscribe to specific types of events and quickly point other telescopes at them for more detailed observations.
