Overview

• In its inaugural public release, the 3,200-megapixel camera captured detailed views of the Virgo cluster and stellar nurseries like the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae.
• Initial survey frames revealed 10 million galaxies, representing roughly 0.05% of the 40 billion celestial objects planned for the full Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
• Within 10 hours of test observations, the facility detected more than 2,100 previously unrecorded asteroids in a focused region of the southern sky.
• SLAC’s data pipelines now process each nightly exposure and issue transient alerts in under two minutes, generating an alert volume equivalent to 83,000 email inboxes per night.
• Full operations scheduled to begin in November will see the observatory capture about 1,000 images every night and amass roughly 20 terabytes of data nightly to fuel dark matter and dark energy research over the next decade.