Rubin Observatory kicks off a decade-long cosmic survey
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun the decade‑long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), using the world’s largest digital camera to capture nightly, color‑rich images of the southern sky and stitch them into a living map of celestial evolution. The project aims to inventory the solar system and Milky Way, investigate dark matter and dark energy, and enable billions of objects with trillions of measurements to be released publicly, generating about 7 million alerts per night for notable events such as asteroids and supernovae. Preliminary imagery began in 2025, and the survey will repeatedly re-image the same sky patches to track changes over time.
