Welcome to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory

A couple of decades in the making, the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Rubin) is the world’s newest and fastest astronomy and astrophysics facility. Located in Chile, its primary mission is to conduct an astronomical survey of the southern sky every few nights, creating a ten-year time-lapse record, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the Universe in history.

The LSST will be an unprecedented astronomical data set for studies of the deep and dynamic universe. It is designed to be for everyone: Rubin will make the data widely accessible to a diverse community of scientists and use it to enable the public to explore the Universe to greater depth and in more detail than ever before.

The LSST Camera, built at SLAC and now mounted on Rubin’s Simonyi Survey Telescope, presents everyone with a Big Data problem: how to cope with more astronomical data than has been taken by all previous telescopes combined, being accumulated and presented at unprecedented speed? Part of the answer to this question is “AI” - but what will that mean, in practice? Come and think big in the CSM Planetarium.

Join Rubin’s Deputy Director of Operations, Phil Marshall, for a virtual tour of the Observatory in Chile and hear more about Rubin and its mission.

Speaker: Philip Marshall, Stanford University/SLAC