Lights, camera, cosmos: the cast and crew behind Rubin Observatory

Read this release on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory website.

Have you ever been to a movie that was so good you didn’t want it to end? Did you sit in the theater mesmerized as the credits rolled, marveling at the people it took to make such an incredible film?

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is making a movie like that. From its vantage point on Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, Rubin will repeatedly image the southern sky for 10 years, creating a cosmic feature film known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

Rubin Observatory is a joint program of NSF NOIRLab and DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which will cooperatively operate Rubin.

Thousands of people across more than 30 countries have worked on Rubin during its multi-decade journey from concept to reality. That's many more people than it takes to make a typical movie. But that number is understandable considering Rubin will reveal the ever-changing nature of the night sky and help scientists delve into existential mysteries, such as the composition of the universe.

Just like a Hollywood blockbuster, Rubin’s movie relies on creative minds, technical expertise and star power to accomplish its mission. Together, these groups will help the observatory bring the night sky to life.

A universe imagined

Every film needs a visionary – someone who can picture the finished product and practically smell the popcorn at the premiere. For Rubin, that’s physicist Tony Tyson. 

In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered that the universe was expanding faster than previously predicted. The mysterious force behind this expansion is now known as dark energy. Dark energy can't be observed directly, but we can see its effect on visible matter and the overall structure of the cosmos. 

Tyson and his colleagues installed a new camera on the NSF Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope – located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab – that was being used for large-scale mapping of the universe. One night in the control room, they brainstormed an idea for a telescope and camera built specifically for that purpose.

“We asked ourselves: Could we build a bigger telescope to collect more light and a camera with more pixels to map the universe?” said Tyson, who is now NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory LSST chief scientist. “With computing power advancing rapidly to handle the enormous data such a facility would generate, it all felt possible.”

Tyson submitted his idea to the 2000 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, a report authored by the community every 10 years to outline priorities for the coming decade. The community liked the idea, and the telescope appeared in the report as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. By the 2010 Decadal Survey, LSST was the top priority among new ground-based observatories. Construction began in 2014 and LSST was renamed NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in 2020. But the acronym was retained: The new LSST is the Rubin data itself, renamed the ‘Legacy Survey of Space and Time.’

The plot of Rubin’s movie is about much more than just dark energy. By imaging the entire night sky every few days, Rubin will reveal the changing nature of the universe. It will track transient events like supernovae and asteroids tumbling through our Solar System. This wide range of science goals can only be achieved thanks to the observatory’s sensitive telescope and camera and their wide field of view.

Just as producers bring a film’s story to life, the Rubin Science Collaborations ensure the project fulfills its science goals. About 2,800 community members are engaged in eight Science Collaborations representing galaxies, the Solar System, dark energy, galaxy cores with supermassive black holes, the Milky Way and our stellar neighborhood, gravitational lensing, objects and events that change over time, and statistical analyses.

“The Science Collaborations figure out how to collect data and turn it into science in a way that benefits everyone,” said Federica Bianco, Deputy Project Scientist for the Rubin Construction Project. “For example, what is the best time interval between observations of the same patch of sky? Which fields do we cover in more depth? Do we observe the Milky Way disk the same way as the extragalactic sky?”

The makeup of the Science Collaborations is broad, including undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, professors, researchers and engineers spanning multiple countries. There are representatives from institutions ranging from Ivy League universities to community colleges.

The technical crew

Movies don’t happen without cameras. That’s certainly the case for Rubin, which will host the LSST Camera – the largest digital camera ever built. At SLAC in Menlo Park, dozens of engineers, technicians, and scientists worked side by side for two decades, from the camera’s conception to final assembly. The 3,200-megapixel camera took shape inside SLAC’s clean room, specially designed to integrate this massive instrument. The camera is about the size of a small car and weighs three metric tons (6,600 pounds). Over the years, visitors and journalists have come to gaze through the room’s large glass doors and admire the scale and ambition of this one-of-a-kind project.

Building the camera was a large collaborative effort that spanned multiple institutions. DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory fabricated the camera’s digital sensor array. DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and its partners built lenses. The National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics at the National Centre for Scientific Research (IN2P3/CNRS) in France contributed to sensor and electronics design and built the camera’s filter exchange system.

Camera construction wrapped up at SLAC in 2024. Next came the monumental milestone of transporting the camera from Silicon Valley to its movie set in Chile. Getting there involved a pilot and plane crew who safely flew it to Santiago and a team of drivers and transport specialists who carefully trucked it up winding mountain roads to the summit of Cerro Pachón.

“Planning the shipment presented many logistics challenges, including communicating with several subcontractors in both the U.S. and in Chile,” said Margaux Lopez, a mechanical engineer for Rubin Observatory. “Everyone on the project breathed a huge sigh of relief when the camera arrived safely.” 

The summit was as crowded as a movie set, with truckers, engineers, technicians, electricians, managers and even a Croatian film crew on hand. Lopez, who is bilingual, coordinated with U.S. and Chilean contractors to unload the camera and unpack it from its shipping container. The Rubin summit and LSST Camera teams installed it successfully in March 2025.

No light would ever reach the camera without Rubin’s mirrors. At the heart of the telescope is an 8.4-meter-wide (28-feet-wide) mirror with two concentric, separately sloped surfaces. This allows it to serve as both a primary and tertiary reflector.

The mirror is the largest ever to use this innovative two-in-one design. The Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson – a facility known for producing some of the world’s finest telescope mirrors – began casting the mirror in 2007, and it took seven years to complete. The mirror received its coat of reflective silver at the summit in a coating chamber built by VON ARDENNE in Deggendorf, Germany.

The camera and mirrors are held in place by the Simonyi Survey Telescope, a steel teal structure capable of moving quickly between targets. The telescope’s compact design and large field of view allows Rubin to scan the entire southern sky every three nights. 

The Telescope Mount Assembly was fabricated, assembled and tested at UTE/Asturfeito in Avilés, Spain. It was shipped in 26 cargo pieces to Chile, where it was meticulously reassembled. The telescope’s various subassemblies were manufactured at NOIRLab instrument shops and at vendors around the world. 

Hundreds of components came together from around the world to be assembled into the world’s next revolutionary scientific tool. Putting everything together was like playing a game of Tetris. 

“The compact design of the telescope made developing the integration procedures for the mirror assemblies and camera challenging,” said John Andrew, a LSST design engineer for Rubin construction. More than 110,000 parts files reside in the observatory’s computer-aided design (CAD) database.

Billions of stars

Rubin’s ultimate movie will feature lots of stars. Not just the 17 billion distant suns that the observatory is expected to catalog over 10 years, but also the scientists and members of the public that will use Rubin’s data to push our knowledge of the universe to new frontiers.

Each night, Rubin will capture a staggering 20 terabytes of data. That’s too much information for scientists to download to their computers every day. Instead, a team of Rubin scientists and engineers, in collaboration with Google Cloud, designed a new way to access the data: the Rubin Science Platform.

After cosmic light makes its way through Rubin’s mirrors, the LSST Camera will convert the information into digital data that will travel on high-speed connections to facilities at SLAC, along with one in the United Kingdom and one in France. To access that data, scientists will work in the cloud – similar to how Google Docs and Microsoft 365 work. This distributed and cloud-based way of storing and accessing astronomy data opens the process of science to a much bigger group of people than could access it otherwise.

“This is different compared to when I was a grad student,” said Frossie Economou, the project manager for the Rubin Observatory Science Platform. “In those days, you’d do your observing and get your data on a tape, and then you’d take your tape back to your university and laboriously work on that.” 

The older method was not only slow but also kept scientists siloed, leaving them to rely on their own analysis tools. With the Rubin Science Platform everyone will have access to the same toolset. Scientists can even contribute new data algorithms for others to use. 

Like the shared experience of watching a movie in a theater, even the public has a role. Rubin will offer citizen science opportunities. These engaging research projects are open to anyone who has an internet connection, and they will allow the public to play a valuable role in creating the film and sharing in the excitement of new discoveries. The public is also invited to engage and interact with Rubin data using easy-to-navigate tools like the Skyviewer, which will be available on rubinobservatory.org in just a couple of weeks. 

With Rubin First Look just around the corner, the stage is set for the ultimate cosmic movie. Thanks to groundbreaking technology and the dedication of thousands of people around the globe, the observatory is poised to deliver unprecedented views of the universe. The previews are over – the main feature is about to begin. 

More information

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, is a groundbreaking new astronomy and astrophysics observatory under construction on Cerro Pachón in Chile, with first light expected in 2025. It is named after astronomer Vera Rubin, who provided the first convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter. Using the largest camera ever built, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years and create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition, time-lapse record of our Universe.

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE/SC). Its primary mission is to carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, providing an unprecedented data set for scientific research supported by both agencies. Rubin is operated jointly by NSF NOIRLaband SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. NSF NOIRLab is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the DOE. France provides key support to the construction and operations of Rubin Observatory through contributions from CNRS/IN2P3. Rubin Observatory is privileged to conduct research in Chile and gratefully acknowledges additional contributions from more than 40 international organizations and teams.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.

The DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

NSF NOIRLab, the U.S. National Science Foundation center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the International Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (in cooperation with DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. 

The scientific community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence of I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) to the Tohono O’odham Nation, and Maunakea to the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) community.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory explores how the universe works at the biggest, smallest and fastest scales and invents powerful tools used by researchers around the globe. As world leaders in ultrafast science and bold explorers of the physics of the universe, we forge new ground in understanding our origins and building a healthier and more sustainable future. Our discovery and innovation help develop new materials and chemical processes and open unprecedented views of the cosmos and life’s most delicate machinery. Building on more than 60 years of visionary research, we help shape the future by advancing areas such as quantum technology, scientific computing and the development of next-generation accelerators. SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.