In June 2025, on a Chilean mountaintop, scientists switched on the largest digital camera ever built — named for the astronomer who found the first convincing evidence for dark matter — at the start of a project whose decade-long survey may finally find a nint - Space Daily

What the report says

Space Daily reports that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun a major new phase in wide-field sky surveying with the largest digital camera built to date. The observatory, located on Cerro Pachón in Chile at about 2,650 metres elevation, presented its first public sky images on 23 June 2025 through the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The 3,200-megapixel camera, made up of 189 sensors, is mounted on the 8.4-metre Simonyi Survey Telescope.

According to the report, the facility cost roughly $810 million and has been in development for about two decades. Its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time began science operations in 2026 after commissioning work in 2025. The observatory is named for astronomer Vera Rubin, whose galaxy-rotation research helped establish evidence for dark matter, one of the project’s major research targets.

A prominent goal is testing the Planet Nine hypothesis: the idea that an unseen world several times Earth’s mass may be influencing the orbits of distant objects beyond Neptune. Space Daily notes that the idea, advanced in a 2016 paper by Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, remains unconfirmed and could also reflect biases in earlier observations.

Rubin’s repeated scans of the southern sky are expected to flag objects that move or vary in brightness and could greatly expand the known population of trans-Neptunian objects. Even if no planet is seen directly, the wider catalogue may show whether the orbital clustering behind the Planet Nine argument is real. The report also notes that satellite streaks in wide-field images are a growing operational challenge.