A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Astronomers are about to use a powerful new telescope to scan the entire southern sky. They'll take so many pictures, it will effectively create a movie to help astronomers spot anything that moves or gets brighter or goes boom. Here's NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: This unusual telescope has been in the works for almost three decades. It got its start in 1996. A scientist named Tony Tyson, who is now at the University of California, Davis, had created what was then the world's largest digital camera, and his group had been invited to hook this camera up to a telescope. So they were sitting there in its control room, taking images of the dark sky.
TONY TYSON: Three o'clock in the morning, and I said, you know, we can do better.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: In principle, he realized, they could make a bigger camera - much bigger. After all, the silicon fabrication technology needed to do it was rapidly improving. And they could put this behemoth of a camera on a big telescope. The sheer amount of data this would collect would be, well, astronomical. But, hey, he knew the computing power needed to mine all that data was rapidly improving, too.
TYSON: So I decided that was going to be the goal, and I guess the rest is history.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He convinced the astronomy community that this big data approach was worth a shot. Funding came from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, among other sources, like Microsoft gurus Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi. The result is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It's named after a scientist famous for her work on dark matter. This observatory has been under construction on a mountaintop in Chile for years, and it's almost ready to start viewing the sky. A few weeks ago, workers installed the biggest digital camera ever built. Sandrine Thomas is one of the project's scientists and a deputy director of construction. She says this camera is the size of a small car.
SANDRINE THOMAS: Which is quite impressive when you stand next to it.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Each image the camera takes is so large, displaying one at full size would take about 400 ultra-high-definition televisions. And the observatory can take hundreds of these giant images a night. That's because its telescope is more compact and rigid than other large telescopes, which reduces vibrations.
THOMAS: What that means is that we can move it very quickly, and it can stabilize very quickly. So you can point and shoot.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Point and shoot is just what they plan to do - over and over and over for 10 years, covering the entire southern sky every few days. Bob Blum is the observatory's director of operations. He says because they'll be capturing so much of the sky and because this telescope can see faint objects...
BOB BLUM: Sometime through the first year of this 10-year survey, we'll have already observed more things than astronomers have ever observed before.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: As the images come in, they'll go through a data system that automatically compares them to previous images. The idea is to spot any changes, like maybe an asteroid flying by or a star exploding.
BLUM: We will observe something like 10 million things that change every night.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The commissioning and fine-tuning of the observatory's instruments should begin this month. The first images will be released later this year. A decade from now, at the end of its run, the Vera Rubin Observatory will have compiled observations on about 40 billion stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. Each one will have been checked out hundreds of times.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
