Overview

• The initial “first light” release includes high-resolution mosaics of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae plus a deep-field view of the Virgo galaxy cluster.
• Rubin Observatory’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Telescope coupled with the 3,200-megapixel LSST camera covers a 3.5-degree field of view and records 20 terabytes of data per night.
• In operational mode the project will collect about 1,000 images each night over ten years, generating a dataset of some 40 billion celestial objects.
• The Legacy Survey of Space and Time will track dynamic events and structures to probe dark matter, characterize dark energy, map the Milky Way and survey near-Earth asteroids.
• Early tests have already uncovered more than 2,100 new asteroids and demonstrated rapid imaging of millions of stars, validating the observatory’s processing capabilities.