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    Giant, all-seeing telescope is set to revolutionize astronomy (science.org)
    167 points by gammarator - 21 hours ago

  • Discussion a year ago (75 points, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927682
    by gnabgib - 18 hours ago
  • Has this not been affected by USA science cuts?
    by idontwantthis - 18 hours ago
  • Is there a figure somewhere on how many TB of images this will produce per day when running in automated sky survey mode?
    by walrus01 - 17 hours ago
  • Q for astronomy people: This is tracking the sky movement as it takes the pictures right? Also, with the atmosphere moving, is there a limit of how large the telescope can be and take photos from earth, before it can't get more quality?
    by viraptor - 16 hours ago
  • If you're just here looking at the HN comments: check out the article. It's really well-written and has a bunch of nice visualizations if you like astronomy things.
    by abound - 16 hours ago
  • I have been working in astronomy for a few years now and I recently have gone back to school for a PhD in orbital dynamics.

    Rubin is going to make a big difference in our knowledge of the asteroid belt, it will likely more than triple the size of our known catalog of asteroids. Its actually somewhat difficult to know exactly how much it will increase our knowledge. The bigger the telescope we build, the fainter the asteroids we see. The difficulty is that while we can make a pretty educated guess as to how many smaller ones there are, this is such a jump that the error bars on that guess is quite large. I am quite excited to see how the catalog of asteroids changes, I expect we will be finding a LOT of smaller rocks near the Earth.

    Asteroids have a broad range of albedo, basically the brightness of the surface can vary from the blackest coal (like 3-5% of the light reflecting) to concrete (up to about 50%). All visible range telescopes will be susceptible to a bias in their observations, since a big black rock will be as bright as a smaller paler rock. We know that the asteroid belt favors the dark material.

    In a couple of years, the Near Earth Object Surveyor (NEOS) space telescope will launch. NEOS is an IR telescope and will not have the same albedo bias. The trade off is that it will measure the black body radiation, meaning asteroids have to be nearer the sun. Broadly these are very complementary surveys, Rubin will be fantastic for filling out the main belt, and NEO Surveyor will do a great job on our neighborhood.

    Source: I worked at Caltech on NEOS, I wrote the code they use to predict known asteroid orbits:

    https://github.com/dahlend/kete

    Edit: I failed to mention that Rubin is a big deal for a lot of time-domain astronomy, I'm just being selfish talking about asteroids only.

    by ddahlen - 15 hours ago
  • The starlink streak issue is real, but isn’t this type of survey uniquely well suited to compensate for it, because it takes repeated exposures in relatively quick succession, meaning the odds of a given pixel being obscured by a streak in successive images get very low? Still not ideal but seems manageable compared to other telescopes running non-automated surveys.
    by jl6 - 13 hours ago
  • This sounds so cool. I sure hope this isn't one of the projects threatened by impending cuts to science funding.
    by Kye - 4 hours ago
  • Holy shazbot! I thought the author was being a bit hyperbolic about the "built for speed" part...

    "The test drive shows off just 20% of Rubin’s maximum speed. At full tilt, a runner wouldn’t be able to keep up.

    Presumably measured at the edge of the platform, but still... WOW!

    by IAmBroom - 4 hours ago
  • I see some parallels with magnetic resonance imaging. I worked on a project optimizing MRI scans a few years back. I remember the PI in the project essentially acknowledging that analyzing single MRI images is absolutely more art than science, but there's a ton of value in getting periodic MRIs (say yearly) and looking at the diffs. I imagine a lot of the value coming from Rubin will be due to this, as well as the reason it was built for speed.
    by inasio - 3 hours ago
  • fictional question: how much detail would we see if we could somehow make a telescope with a 1 million km diameter
    by vivzkestrel - 3 hours ago
  • I visited the cleanroom where they manufactured and assembled the lens and processing unit before shipping to Chile. world’s largest digital camera at 3200-megapixel image in a few seconds.
    by asinno - 1 hour ago

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