I spent most of last week as part of a review committee in preparation for the annual joint status director’s review. I find these to be extremely interesting meetings because they talk about the detailed status for the construction of the Rubin Observatory and it’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) telescope. My role is this team is to evaluate the status report from the point of view of safety, which in my case means “System Safety”. I have always been a tiny bit of an astronomy “geek” (maybe really a wannabee geek – on the outside looking in). Being on this team met a lot of my lifetime goals of somehow being involved in BIG science, particularly big astronomy science.

I have been working on this project as a safety consultant for the past five years – but there are always some new things that I didn’t know about, or perhaps didn’t fully appreciate. This year’s review was no exception.

The LSST is a very large (about 27 feet in diameter), with a HUGE 3200 megapixel camera. It is designed to perform a ten-year full sky survey of the southern sky (because it is located in Chile where that is what you can see). Once operational in 2023 (or thereabouts), it will take 15-second “snapshots” of the sky, moving between shots to eventually get the entire visible sky each night. Each snapshot is about the size of 40 full moons. While this seems to be a pretty large piece of the sky, the camera is so large with such a high resolution that it will find LOTS of things to look at. At last week’s meeting they mentioned that it is expected that the telescope will identify and catalog 30 billion (yes, with a B) galaxies, something like 17 billion stars, and 7 or 8 billion other things (such as comets, asteroids, and who knows what else). The changes in position and other things such as color will be recorded and monitored.

One of the primary purposes of this new type of telescope is to gather information that might help understand dark matter. Of course, with that much information it will undoubtedly be critical in a LOT of other astrophysics explorations. One of the really cool things about this telescope project is that the data will be made freely available to anyone that might be interested – including you, me, and k-12 STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) programs.

Mainly I am writing this just to express my awe – not so much about the technology of the telescope (although that is awe inspiring), but that the vastness of the universe that is so large that they can find 30 billion GALAXIES!!! Holly molly – and that is just the part that they expect to be able to see, identify and study. This telescope will be able to see things that are 10,000 times dimmer than the dimmest that the Hubble Telescope can resolve. Amazing.

So where could all of this immense amount of matter and energy come from? How odd – I try to think about it and my mind just kind of flops around out of control, it just makes no sense in any way shape or form to me.