The 62-ton piece of glass that will soon become Rubin Observatory's combined primary/tertiary mirror was unboxed at the summit this week and lifted onto its steel support cell! 🧵
A team from the @uarizona Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab made the trip to Chile to complete the lift using a custom-made vacuum lifter called a "spider" 🕷️
Next up: integrating the glass with the cell, and then moving it to the coating chamber to get its shiny silver coating!
And no, we didn't order the mirror in blue by mistake--that's a protective Opti-Coat layer that keeps the vacuum lifter from damaging the surface of the glass. It'll be removed before the mirror is coated!
With these general pictures, scientists can study many different things using the same data.
One scientist could use the images to study stationary galaxies. Another could use the same images to look for objects that change or move in the sky, like supernovae or asteroids.
Over the course of its 10-year survey, Rubin will take more than five million pictures of the entire visible night sky in more detail than has been possible before, enabling new discoveries about the Universe. #CatchTheUniverse
With this achievement, construction of the NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory is nearing its final stretch! The LSST Camera will be installed on Rubin’s Simonyi Survey Telescope later this year.
In early 2025, the car-sized 3200-megapixel camera will begin to #CaptureTheCosmos in exquisite detail for Rubin’s 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time and enable countless scientific discoveries - from within our Solar System out to distant galaxies!
We're officially unveiling our suite of brand new interactive & online experiences designed specially for you to be able to explore Rubin Observatory technology, science, and people! #CatchTheUniverse
This marks the official public launch of the Rubin Education & Public Outreach program 🥳
The entire program is online and optimized for mobile devices—all you need is an internet connection and a mobile device to be able to participate and explore! #CatchTheUniverse
You can find everything online at https://rubinobservatory.org in both English & Spanish—including an image gallery, animated videos, education resources for teachers, an online game👀, & all the information you’ll need about Rubin.
Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a new facility being built on Cerro Pachón in Chile (you might know us by our former name: LSST). When complete, Rubin will image the sky every 3-4 nights for 10 years, using an 8.4m telescope & 3200 MP car-sized camera! 🧵
Rubin will take repeated images of the visible sky, so it’ll be great at finding objects that have changed in brightness (like supernovae) or position (like asteroids).
Rubin’s light-collecting power & sensitive camera will also detect tens of billions of new galaxies & stars!
With all of these different types of observations in one huge dataset (60 petabytes in total, to be exact), Rubin is poised to enable scientists to address some of their biggest questions about the Universe and revolutionize our understanding of astronomy and astrophysics!
That feeling when you check a huge item off your to-do list...
Giant digital camera: ✅
Construction of Rubin Observatory's car-sized camera is officially complete at SLAC National Accelerator Lab! We're one step closer to being ready to #CaptureTheCosmos🌌
To close out #WomensHERstoryMonth, we're celebrating our namesake, Dr. Vera C. Rubin ✨
Dr. Rubin was an accomplished American astronomer whose work provided convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter. Rubin Observatory was renamed in her honor in 2019.
Once online starting in 2025, Rubin Observatory will #CaptureTheCosmos night after night and produce a deluge of data that will help scientists understand more about about dark matter, among so many other fields of science! 🌌
It's not every day we get to throw a welcome home party 🎉
Last week marked a big construction achievement with the move of our 8.4-meter primary/tertiary mirror into the main observatory building! It'll now go through preparations to get its shiny silver coating ✨
Two of our staff are living it up in Taiwan this week as they present Rubin's interactive classroom materials at the 2023 International Conference on K-12 Astronomy Education.
Check out our materials for yourself at rubinobservatory.org/education!
Dos de nuestras colegas están esta semana en Taiwán mientras presentan los materiales interactivos de Rubin para las salas de clases en la Conferencia Internacional sobre Educación en Astronomía K-12 de 2023.
Scientists have found two interstellar objects so far: 'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. With the Legacy Survey of Space & Time (#LSST), they'll find many more.
While it's hard to predict how many, one thing's for sure: Solar System science will enter a new era of discovery with Rubin!
Rubin Observatory is a HUGE feat of engineering. It uniquely combines several new technologies, which will make its 10-year survey of the visible Southern sky possible.
Come along with us for a short tour of each one! #CatchTheUniverse 🧵
Rubin looks different from other observatories with its long, low service building. This building includes a full mirror-coating chamber, so we don’t need to send our mirror down the mountain for servicing. #CatchTheUniverse