Large Sky Survey Telescope Launches Ten-Year Imaging Campaign

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its decade-long survey on June 30 from Chile, using the largest operational digital camera—a 3.2-gigapixel instrument capturing roughly 1,000 images nightly. Each point in the southern sky will be imaged 800 times over ten years, generating petabytes of time-series data to detect transient events, track near-Earth objects, and test dark-energy models. The structured dataset will likely anchor astronomical machine-learning pipelines for years.