Numlock Sunday: Rebecca Boyle on the telescope that will change everything

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to space journalist Rebecca Boyle, who wrote This Revolutionary New Telescope Will Observe the Whole Sky Every Three Days for Scientific American. Here's what I wrote about it:

Just a few weeks of testing remain for the hotly anticipated Vera C. Rubin Observatory, situated on a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes. It’s got the largest camera in the history of astronomy — a 10-meter-by-10-meter steel cube — with a 1.5-meter lens, a unique three-mirror structure and a collecting area of 6.67 meters. The camera weighs 350 metric tons, and will canvas the entire visible sky from the Southern Hemisphere every three nights, producing an eye-watering 20 terabytes of data every single night that the computer scientists are still figuring out how to sift through. That is 350 times the data produced by the James Webb Space Telescope every day. In its first year alone, the camera will collect more data than has been collected f…