Every time a new observatory is designed, it’s an opportunity for incorporating new technology or innovative approaches. Read on to discover ten ways that Rubin Observatory is using technology to revolutionize astronomy and astrophysics!
Image credit: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA
The entire Rubin Observatory system is designed for speed, so we can take pictures of the whole sky as quickly as possible. The telescope can change positions and be ready to take a new exposure in just five seconds (most large telescopes take minutes). A lot of features combine to make this possible: the compact size of the telescope, the rigidness of the telescope mount, the speed of the camera filter changer, and a "crawling dome" that is constantly in motion, anticipating the next position of the telescope to get the opening in the right place!
The autonomous computer software that moves the telescope can also make on-the-fly decisions based on sky conditions, or to rapidly respond to a new discovery, like following up on a gravitational wave detection.
Image credit: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA
A telescope pier is like a permanent version of a tripod for a camera—it provides stability and support for the telescope. The telescope pier at Rubin Observatory is unusually large (16 m in diameter) and sturdy (1.25 m thick walls). This massive pier offers protection from small earthquakes, and it also provides the telescope with excellent stability so it can move quickly and point precisely.
Image credit: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA
The 8.4-meter primary telescope mirror has two differently curved surfaces, which means light reflects from it twice: once when the light first reaches the telescope, and again after bouncing off a secondary mirror. What’s so great about having the two mirrors combined on one surface? It reduces the length of the telescope, which allows it to move faster and settle more quickly between images. In this photo, the glass mirror is being polished at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona. Its reflective coating was applied on the summit in 2022.
Image credit: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA
Under the telescope are huge banks of capacitors (the orange boxes in the photo). The capacitors power the motors that move the telescope, and they recharge themselves when the telescope brakes. This technique, called regenerative braking, is also used by electric cars to recharge their batteries.
Image credit: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA
Every few years, new reflective coatings have to be applied to telescope mirrors to keep the quality of the images the best it can be. Usually the mirrors have to be moved to a different facility, but Rubin Observatory has its very own mirror coating chamber (the silver object in the center of the photo) inside the observatory building. Coating the mirrors onsite saves time and money, and reduces the chance of damage during transport.
Image credit: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA
Rubin Observatory's camera contains the largest optical lens ever built. This is the largest of the three lenses that collect and focus light in the camera.
Image credit: SAFRAN
The telescope’s camera, which was built at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, has a few things to brag about:
* It’s the highest-resolution digital camera in the world (and we’ve got the Guinness World Record to prove it!). If you could see that well, you’d be able to spot a golf ball on the Moon while standing on Earth!
* It’s the largest digital camera ever built, about the size of a small car.
* If those aren’t enough to impress you, the camera also has the fastest data readout time of any camera built so far (1.6 billion pixels per second).
Image credit: LSST Camera Project/T. Lange
Rubin Observatory will generate 20 terabytes of data per night. It would take you over three years of watching Netflix, or over 50 years of listening to Spotify, to use that amount of data.
Image credit: Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA
Rubin Observatory will image each area of the sky about 1000 times during its initial ten-year survey. Combining the data from these images will produce color images containing millions of faint objects we’ve never been able to see before! At the end of its survey, Rubin Observatory will have detected more celestial objects than there are living people on Earth: about 20 billion galaxies, and 17 billion stars.
Image credit: Rubin Observatory modified from a section of the Hubble Deep Field mosaic created by R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
Action happens in the sky all the time. Stars change in brightness or explode, comets and asteroids cruise by, or something rare appears for just a short time, like the afterglow from a gamma ray burst. Every night, Rubin Observatory detects about 10 million changes in the sky, and reports each change to the world within minutes.
Image credit: Christian Gloor, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
