All-seeing eye

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By Daniel Clery, Science. 

Excerpt: Cerro Pachón in Chile ...the giant telescope is built for speed. ...The camera at its heart is fast, too, capable of spitting out a 3200-megapixel image from each exposure in less than 3 seconds. ...10 May, ...commissioning scientist Kevin Fanning prepares to take his 350-ton baby out for a spin. At the press of a button on his laptop, the towering structure begins to move and is soon rotating effortlessly on a thin film of oil. ...Rubin needs to be fast because it must cover a lot of sky—all of it. ...Rubin will march relentlessly across the firmament, capturing swaths in a field of view that covers the equivalent of 45 full Moons. At each stop its 3-ton, car-size camera will record the view with an array of 189 light sensors cooled to –100°C, producing an image so rich it would take a wall of 400 ultrahigh-definition TV screens to display it in full. Each snapshot takes 30 seconds; then the telescope slews in less than 5 seconds to a new vista. In this way, it will build up a patchwork picture of the entire sky visible from Chile in just 3 days before starting all over again. The panoramas will gradually grow into a time-lapse movie of the universe. By comparing each new image in that movie with what has come before, Rubin will detect everything that has moved, changed brightness, or suddenly appeared. Within 1 minute of dispatching an image, Rubin’s processing center at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California will generate alerts for each new “transient”—as many as 10 million every night. Some will be close to home, in the Solar System: millions of new asteroids and other objects.... Rubin won’t ignore objects that persist through time. By repeatedly “stacking” images as the 10-year survey progresses, it will slowly build up the deepest and most detailed map ever made of the cosmos, including billions of galaxies.... The vast archive, growing by 20 terabytes each night, will after 1 year contain more optical astronomy data than that produced by all previous telescopes combined. This epic survey is scheduled to begin in about 6 months. ...The first test images will be revealed to the public on 23 June.... 

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