How America's New Vera C. Rubin Observatory Maps the Universe Each Night
Each night, Rubin produces 10 terabytes of data to map and survey the universe and generates millions of alerts about changing objects to help scientists zoom in with other telescopes, including the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes or ground-based instruments.
The United States Department of Energy-National Science Foundation Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to change how we explore the universe. In this video, we break down how Rubin runs the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), what its images contain, how the data gets processed, and why this observatory is designed as a discovery engine for the entire science community. You will also see Rubin first-light imagery presented with scientifically accurate scaling and positioning against a real 360° all-sky backdrop.
https://rubinobservatory.org
Rubin’s survey is not about single, ultra-detailed snapshots like space telescopes. Instead, Rubin revisits the same regions again and again, building a 10-year time-lapse of the entire southern sky. This allows scientists to detect changes—moving asteroids, exploding stars, variable objects, and subtle shifts that only appear when you compare new images to a reference set of images of the whole southern sky.
Rubin and space telescopes serve complementary roles. Rubin finds what is new and changing, then issues alerts and targets of interest so that deeper, narrower-field observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope can zoom in and study those objects in close detail. Rubin will also create yearly highly detailed catalogs of 20 billion galaxies in our universe, 17 billion stars in the Milky Way, and millions of objects in the solar system.
Rubin is a ground-based observatory located on Cerro Pachón in northern Chile at 2,680 meters elevation. That site combines altitude, dry air, and stable conditions that are ideal for wide-field survey astronomy. Being ground-based is key to Rubin’s speed. The telescope is engineered to take 15-30 seconds exposures every 30-40 seconds. It slews and settles quickly to the next field while tracking precisely to compensate for Earth’s rotation during each exposure. Rubin’s data processing system also detects and removes artifacts such as satellite streaks (by combining multiple images of the same area) so they do not contaminate the final data products.
NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Rubin is operated jointly by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Presenter: Phil Marshall, Deputy Director of Operations, Rubin Observatory/SLAC
Duration: 5 minutes, 33 seconds
Release Date: March 11, 2026
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