Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, originally called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), sits in Chile’s Coquimbo Region. Its primary mission is to repeatedly image the southern sky every few nights, building a decade-long time-lapse dataset known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (also LSST). The observatory is perched on El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, a 2,682-meter mountain in northern Chile, sharing the site with the Gemini South and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescopes. Its base facility, about 100 kilometers away by road, is in La Serena. The observatory is named after Vera Rubin, the American astronomer whose work on galactic rotation rates was groundbreaking. It is a joint project of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, operated jointly by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. At the heart of the observatory is the Simonyi Survey Telescope, a wide-field reflecting telescope with an 8.4-meter primary mirror. It uses a three-mirror anastigmat design to produce sharp images across a 3.5-degree-diameter field of view. Images are captured by a 3.2-gigapixel CCD camera, the largest ever built. Rubin Observatory achieved first light in June 2025 and began full survey operations on 30 June 2026. It snaps an image of the sky every 40 seconds, completing a full scan of the southern sky every few days for ten years. The survey is expected to catalog millions of supernovae, over five million asteroids (including roughly 100,000 near-Earth objects), and image about 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies. The telescope was originally called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope; “synoptic” comes from Greek words meaning “together” and “view,” describing observations that provide a broad overview. In June 2019, the observatory was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, proposed by U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson and Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico Jenniffer González-Colón. The renaming became U.S. law on 20 December 2019 and was announced at the 2020 American Astronomical Society winter meeting. The name honors Rubin and her colleagues’ investigations into dark matter by mapping and cataloging billions of galaxies across space and time. The telescope itself is named the Simonyi Survey Telescope, after private donors Charles and Lisa Simonyi.