Rubin Observatory Begins 10-Year Legacy Survey of Space and Time

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially begun its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, marking the start of full survey operations for a project built to repeatedly map the night sky on a scale and schedule that could transform how astronomers track change.

The start was announced Tuesday, June 30, by NSF NOIRLab, the National Science Foundation’s ground-based astronomy center, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and reposted by Fermilab. Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director, said, “Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made.”

What sets Rubin apart is not just the size of the telescope, but how it will operate night after night. Its main instrument, LSSTCam, is a 3,200-megapixel, or 3.2-gigapixel, camera that Rubin and SLAC describe as the largest digital camera built for astronomy. During nighttime operations, the observatory is designed to capture a new image about every 40 seconds. Over the course of the decade-long survey, it is expected to return to each point in its survey footprint about 800 times, creating a long record of how the sky changes. Rubin’s systems are also designed to compare those images quickly and send out public scientific alerts within about two minutes when something appears to move, brighten, fade or otherwise change.

That operating model is central to the project’s science goals. Rubin is intended to support research into dark matter and dark energy while also opening a powerful new window on time-domain astronomy, the study of objects and events that change over time. That includes supernovae, variable objects and other transient phenomena, as well as Solar System targets such as asteroids, comets and trans-Neptunian objects beyond Neptune.

Rubin had already begun to show how that system could work before the formal launch of LSST. The observatory issued its first scientific alerts on the night of Feb. 24, 2026, producing about 800,000 alerts in a single night. Rubin says that system is expected to scale to roughly 7 million alerts per night in full operations. Earlier, during optimization surveys in summer 2025, teams reported discovering more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, including about 33 near-Earth objects and about 380 trans-Neptunian object candidates. Those findings, announced publicly in April 2026, came before the official start of the survey but offered an early demonstration of Rubin’s ability to spot moving objects.

The launch of LSST follows several years of milestones as the observatory moved from construction into science operations. The camera arrived in Chile in May 2024, Rubin released first-look images in June 2025, and the alert stream went live in February 2026. Tuesday’s announcement marks the point at which the observatory shifts from commissioning and testing into its flagship survey.

Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the DOE Office of Science and jointly operated by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC. According to Rubin leadership, the decision to begin the survey came after technical and operational checks were completed. “The decision to officially begin the LSST was made after a period of system optimization and a careful operational review of technical readiness…,” said Željko Ivezić, head of LSST.