> In Rubin’s first year alone, scientists expect the observatory to find 1 million undiscovered asteroids — as many as have been documented in the previous 200 years of human history — as well as thousands of comets and billions of stars and galaxies.
Why stop at 200 years? It's also 300 years and 400 years, or 4 billion years :P
The idea of predicting an imminent impactor is very cool. I heard the boom from a confirmed bolide explosion on Saturday afternoon in Boston. It was cool. Would love to have seen the actual explosion but it was very overcast and may or may not have been visible in daylight anyway. I would definitely travel if I had a reasonable expectation of seeing one.
interesting, not a single word about satellites and how they are influencing the quality of their work. I would imagine the telescope is affected in particular of this problem by taking constant snapshots of huge areas in the night sky, but nope...
Those are filtered in the data processing pipelines, before the data is exported. Streak-detection algorithms work very well, and they can mask known satellites from the data. It was, in fact, a key requirement of them being allowed to operate. VR is sensitive enough that it can sense the "secret" [1] national security sats, so they filter those early in the pipeline, and only issue alerts for things that are not satellites.
"Simulations of the LSST observing cadence and 40,000 LEO satellites show that about 10% of all LSST images would contain at least one satellite trail"
"Satellites and debris dimmer than 6th to 7th visual magnitude still cause streaks and glints, but typically leave the rest of the pixels scientifically usable."
Why stop at 200 years? It's also 300 years and 400 years, or 4 billion years :P
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...
"Simulations of the LSST observing cadence and 40,000 LEO satellites show that about 10% of all LSST images would contain at least one satellite trail"
"Satellites and debris dimmer than 6th to 7th visual magnitude still cause streaks and glints, but typically leave the rest of the pixels scientifically usable."