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CNN: Thousands of asteroids and millions of galaxies shine in first images from the largest camera ever built (archive) (lite)

Vera Rubin is finally putting out:

nsf-doe-rubin-virgo-cluster-2-im3crop2.webpnsf-doe-rubin-trifid-and-lagoon-nebulas-10k.webp

The pretty pictures don't really matter. In fact, they could produce duplicates of these every week if they wanted to, since it's going to photograph the entire sky (as seen in Chile) repeatedly, indefinitely. What they will be able to do is find undetected asteroids, dwarf planets, and possibly planets in our solar system, by tracking the changes between the pictures.
 
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
CNN: Thousands of asteroids and millions of galaxies shine in first images from the largest camera ever built (archive) (lite)

Vera Rubin is finally putting out:
The pretty pictures don't really matter. In fact, they could produce duplicates of these every week if they wanted to, since it's going to photograph the entire sky (as seen in Chile) repeatedly, indefinitely. What they will be able to do is find undetected asteroids, dwarf planets, and possibly planets in our solar system, by tracking the changes between the pictures.
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Those are cooler images than I was expecting for the first light. Rubin will be great for surveying, it can go through the entire visible night sky every few days, collecting over 20TBs of data every day. On the other hand, I'm very excited for ELT in a year and an half, which is on the other end of the spectrum: a thousand times narrower FOV, with 6 times the effective diameter, and with the best adaptive optics syste- oh, wait: it was pushed again from 2027 to 2029/2030 a few months ago. I can't fucking take it.

The Rubin presentation had some cool footage and images (link), there's also a website to explore the night sky.
 
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mindlessobserver said:
It would be so cool if we could actually detect these things coming in in time to actually intercept one and do some heckin science on it.
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I made a post about it in the UFO thread. The Vera Rubin Observatory should find more of them and find them faster. These objects should be relatively challenging to reach due to their extreme orbital inclination and velocity, and it's likely impossible to intercept them using already launched spacecraft as a target of opportunity.
 
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
I made a post about it in the UFO thread. The Vera Rubin Observatory should find more of them and find them faster. These objects should be relatively challenging to reach due to their extreme orbital inclination and velocity, and it's likely impossible to intercept them using already launched spacecraft as a target of opportunity.
Click to expand...
It probably could be done, but it would require multiple vehicles put into cold storage at extreme orbits and then hope an incoming appears on a path that one of them could adjust too.

Unfortunately that would be massively expensive. Maybe we could get some Pentagon dollars and sell it as an early warning system for an alien invasion.
 
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