Rubin Observatory Construction will be completed in about half a year: LSST will start before the end of 2025!

Many major milestones were accomplished in 2024, with first on-sky images obtained with an engineering camera demonstrating that the Simony Survey Telescope (SST) is operational. In early March, the main LSST camera was attached to the telescope and we anticipate the first on-sky images, the so-called First Photon milestone, in April.

Going back to the accomplishments from 2024, the primary/tertiary mirror (M1M3) for SST was coated with a layer of silver in April 2024 and thus prepared for final integration with the rest of the telescope.  The last major piece of equipment, the LSST Camera, was shipped from SLAC to Chile in May 2024. The successful transport of the camera and supporting equipment and tools, (3 large containers and 47 crates) to Chile, first by Boeing 747 plane from San Francisco to Santiago and then by 9 trucks to the Observatory, was a major step towards the completion of the Rubin Observatory. 

Rubin’s Simony Survey Telescope was fully integrated for the first time in early October 2024, with all three mirrors and an engineering (commissioning) camera installed. After 10 years of intensive construction of the Rubin Observatory, and 20 years since the project began, the first images of the night sky were obtained with engineering camera on October 24, 2024! In parallel with hardware integration and commissioning, software pipelines are being completed and tested using extant and Rubin Auxiliary Telescope data, as well as these commissioning image data. In particular, the Rubin group at DiRAC is leading the Alert Pipeline testing and commissioning. 

After using this telescope configuration to image the sky until mid-December 2024, the Rubin team removed the 144-megapixel engineering camera and installed the final science component: the car-sized 3,200-megapixel LSST camera. We except the very first on-sky images with the LSST Camera in April, the first science quality images by early summer, the completion of the construction project by the end of September, and the start of 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time before the end of 2025.

As Rubin Observatory Construction is nearing its completion, the Rubin Operations Team is preparing for the start of LSST and relentless sky surveying, while several thousand members of eight Rubin Science Collaborations are finalizing their preparations and tools for data analysis. DiRAC’s members are playing a major role in these preparations and positioning themselves to partake in the rich harvest of science results to be soon enabled by LSST data!

Prof. Željko Ivezić

Director of Rubin Construction

Professor of Astronomy, University of Washington

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