The universe now has a decade long time lapse in the making. On June 30, 2026, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, perched on Cerro Pachon in the Chilean Andes, formally began the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a 10 year campaign that astronomers have anticipated for more than 20 years. The survey, known as the LSST, will scan the entire southern sky every few nights and build what the observatory calls the most cinematic record of the universe ever made. Funded jointly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and operated by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the facility is named for Vera Rubin, the astronomer whose work gave the first convincing evidence that dark matter exists.
At the heart of the observatory sits the 8.4 meter Simonyi Survey Telescope paired with the 3,200 megapixel LSST Camera, the largest digital camera in the world. That camera is now recording a fresh, detailed image of the sky roughly every 40 seconds, sweeping across the heavens fast enough to cover the whole southern sky in a matter of nights and then do it again. Over the coming decade Rubin will revisit each point in the sky about 800 times, stacking those exposures to reveal objects far too faint to catch in a single frame and to trace how the sky changes from night to night. Some cosmic events unfold slowly, unpredictably, or very rarely, which is why the survey needs 10 full years rather than a single season of observing.
The distinction between what happened last year and what happened last week matters. Rubin celebrated its First Look in June 2025, releasing early imagery that showed the system worked, and that was followed by final commissioning, an operational readiness review, and the switching on of its nightly alert stream. What began on June 30 is the real thing, the start of full survey operations after the team judged the observatory ready. “The decision to officially begin the LSST was made after a period of system optimization and a careful operational review of technical readiness, data system performance, and scientific validation,” said Zeljko Ivezic, Head of LSST, who cited image quality, survey speed, reliability, and calibration accuracy among the factors that mattered.
The science reach is broad by design. By watching the sky change over years, Rubin will chart the accelerating expansion driven by dark energy, map the invisible scaffolding of dark matter through its gravitational pull on light, catalog billions of galaxies, and read the fossil record written in the stars of the Milky Way. It is also the most capable Solar System discovery machine ever built, taking about a thousand images every night and compiling a census of asteroids and comets in our own backyard. The early returns are already striking. During its optimization runs, before the survey even formally started, Rubin turned up more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, among them 33 near Earth objects and 380 trans Neptunian objects out beyond the orbit of Neptune.
The scale of the data is part of what makes the project feel new. Each night Rubin gathers roughly 10 terabytes of information and issues as many as 7 million alerts flagging something in the sky that has moved, brightened, or appeared. Those alerts flow to automated brokers that sort and classify them so scientists can chase fleeting events such as supernovae, feeding black holes, and collisions between dense stellar remnants within hours. When the survey is finished, its catalog is expected to hold billions of objects described by trillions of measurements, released to the public in stages. “Rubin Observatory is for everyone; the LSST will change how we do astronomy and astrophysics, allowing researchers anywhere to participate,” said Bob Blum, Director of Rubin Observatory at NSF NOIRLab.
For the people who built it, the opening night carried the weight of two decades of work. “Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF Director. The comparison to cinema is more than a flourish, since the survey really does produce a moving picture of the sky rather than a set of still portraits. What that movie eventually reveals, from the behavior of dark energy to whatever unexpected objects drift through the frame, is now a question that will be answered one clear Chilean night at a time.
Source: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory and SLAC press releases (June 30, 2026). Image credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA.