Astronomers say the shiny new Vera C. Rubin Telescope will be able to map the entire universe with remarkable precision in no time. Already, it has located tens of thousands of asteroids close to home. Dean Regas chats with Dr. Mario Jurić, the solar system lead scientist for the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, to find out more.
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Episode Transcript: Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: How do you find 11,000 asteroids in no time without really trying?
[NBC Bay Area News Tonight, KNTV, July 2, 2026] Reporter: The largest digital camera in the world, it has 3,200 megapixels.
[KRON 4 News, KRON, July 1, 2026] Reporter: Scientists say it is going to take hundreds of images each night, helping map billions of stars and galaxies.
Dean Regas: You just need a really big telescope that can survey huge swaths of the sky and look for stuff moving. And a 3,200-megapixel camera does not hurt either. Today, we are going to get the virtual tour of the Vera Rubin Telescope that has recently come online in northern Chile.
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I am your host, Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up, the show that takes you deep into the cosmos, or just to the telescope in your backyard, to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
My guest today is Dr. Mario Jurić, faculty at the University of Washington and solar system lead scientist for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Man, I cannot wait to hear more about the brand-new Vera Rubin Telescope. Astronomers have been very excited and hyping this thing up, even in its design stages.
[NSFScience, YouTube, June 23rd,2025] Host: What if I told you that in just 10 hours, this telescope found over 2,000 brand-new asteroids? This is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and it is about to revolutionize how we see our solar system.
Dean Regas: But before it really got started mapping distant, swirling galaxies, it did something else that surprised the heck out of me: finding thousands of asteroids much closer to home. It was just like a side quest.
But one thing I have noticed, and how can you not, is that many of the world's new premier telescopes are located in Chile. You have the ALMA Observatory, with its dozens of radio telescopes perched high in the Atacama Desert. Nearby are the Paranal Observatory, which features the appropriately named Very Large Telescope, abbreviated VLT, and the La Silla Observatory. Outside La Serena is the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and many more new and larger telescopes are planned to go on the mountainsides of Chile in the coming years.
So why Chile? Well, No. 1, this area has unbelievably dark skies, far from any cities or light pollution. It is also one of the driest places on Earth with almost no rain clouds. No. 2, elevation. ALMA, for instance, is at about 16,000 feet above sea level, making the air unbelievably steady. They have added a lot of infrastructure, such as roads and transportation options. It has improved significantly, and so you can actually get to these peaks for observing. Also, it is in the Southern Hemisphere. So these observatories can aim at parts of the sky not visible from the continental U.S. Add all of this up and the Vera Rubin Observatory may just make astronomical history. Let us find out more.
Mario Jurić: Hi, my name is Mario Jurić. I am an astronomy faculty at the University of Washington, and I lead the University of Washington's team on Rubin Observatory.
Dean Regas: Well, Mario, thanks so much for joining me today.
Mario Jurić: Thank you. Good to be here.
Dean Regas: So first off, tell us all about the Vera Rubin Observatory. What makes it such a unique place and a little bit about where it is located?
Mario Jurić: So Vera Rubin is a new observatory. It has just been completed. It is located in Chile in the Chilean Andes, about 2.6 kilometers above sea level. So, it is not too high, but it is quite high enough. What is unique about it is it is a very, very large telescope. It is an 8.4-meter. So, it is one of the larger ones in the world. But what this one is designed to do is, rather than image one or a few or maybe a few hundred objects at a time, this one is designed to cover the entire sky every three days and essentially download the sky. So, what we want to do with it is we are going to build the largest census of the universe ever.
We are going to build the largest census of the universe ever.
Dean Regas: One of the things that I noticed about it was its design. It is incredibly short, like a tube. Well, I mean, I do not know if it is a tube actually, now that I think about it. But anyway, old-style telescopes are long and skinny. This is short and fat. What is going on with that?
Mario Jurić: Yeah. Every time I walk into the observatory, I start singing to myself: "I'm a little teapot, short and stout." The reason for that is speed, right? As I said, what we want to do with this is we want to download the sky and then offer it to all the scientists out there. And to do that, you need to be able to move quickly from one area of the sky to another. If you build something that is very, very long, it has got a lot of inertia and it is hard to move. But if you build something that is short and stout, it can rotate very rapidly. So, this is by far the fastest large optical telescope in the world. It can make a 180-degree turn in about 18 seconds. And that is 250 tons of glass and steel that is spinning when it does that.
Dean Regas: Well, and then add on to it the most powerful camera ever built. How many megapixels are we talking about with this camera?
Mario Jurić: 3,200 megapixels. It is composed of 189 what we call separate detectors, separate chips. It is like 2 feet across, just the chips. So, the thing that is in your cellphone, in the back of your cellphone, that is usually like under half an inch across. Well, our thing is 2 feet across. It weighs 3.2 tons. And if you tried to visualize an image in resolution of the human eye, one image from that camera, and we take one image every 30 seconds, it would take you a basketball court full of 65-inch 4K TVs. So that is the amount of information and the amount of data that we get every 30 seconds from that machine. It is just beautiful.
Dean Regas: And I take it the other plus is you could do kind of wide-angle shots, like instead of, you know, the James Webb Space Telescope that is zoomed in on kind of a narrow area, you can survey large swaths of the sky.
Mario Jurić: Yeah. If you take a look at the moon, the size of the moon in the sky, our camera in 30 seconds can take an image that covers a 45 times larger area than the area of the moon. So that is kind of part of the goal of the project. We want to image as many objects as there are out there, download it to a database, and then train computers on that to find us the most interesting things in the whole universe.
Dean Regas: Well, the media story that got my attention was the release of the first pictures. I think that got everybody in the field really excited. What were the highlights to you? What did they showcase?
Mario Jurić: We call this the first-look event. We just took images over a tiny portion of the sky, so kind of two and a half fields of view of Rubin, so like two and a half shots. But we have taken hundreds of images in that location. The whole thing took about 10 hours or so. So in the grand scheme of things, it was not that much observing. But in those 10 hours, we went as deep as the Hubble Deep Fields over an area that is about a thousand times larger. We have seen millions of galaxies; we have seen thousands of asteroids.
I was just giving a talk yesterday and commented: I have one small subset out of that initial data release that I am going to use to teach an entire 10-week course, because on one image you can see so much data, so much stuff out there, that you can teach everything from how stars evolve all the way to how the universe expands itself. And again, it is just a tiny sliver of what is coming. It was just 10 hours, and we are going to have 3,000 times more data than that.
Dean Regas: Well, and you mentioned asteroids, and it seemed like as a bonus, like seemingly without trying, the observatory discovered so many thousands and thousands of asteroids, more than 34,000 as of now. I mean, how did that part come about? I did not think that was going to be the main thing. I thought it was all about galaxies. But then you got these asteroids thrown in there, too.
Mario Jurić: Well, that is the advantage of this project, right? When you set out to download the universe, you see everything. There is just no avoiding it. You see things that are close. You see things that are far and things that are really, really far. And asteroids are actually one of the things where we are going to be incredibly efficient. So, the way you detect asteroids is by their motion. Stars stay where they are. Galaxies stay where they are. But asteroids move. And this telescope observes over and over and over again, so we can see things that move really well. And in this first-look event, so as I mentioned, only about 10 hours of observing total, we found about 2,100 new asteroids.
When you set out to download the universe, you see everything. There is just no avoiding it.
Dean Regas: All right, Mario, I am going to give you a tough one. I am going to have you predict the future. Is it possible that the Rubin Observatory could discover a previously undetected planet lurking in the distant reaches of our solar system, the so-called Planet Nine, thought by some astronomers to exist? What do you think? Can it find it?
Mario Jurić: I am going to make a bold statement so I can be called on it three years from now: I think if it is out there, we will find it. I think all the current kind of signals that seem to be pointing that there might be a planet out there, there is a lot of debate in the community on whether those are real or not. I think if they are real, this planet has to be in just the right size regime that we should be able to see it. And if for whatever reason we do not, there is like a 5% or 10% chance we do not, and that is going to be because it is hiding in a really, really tough spot to look, like right on top of our galactic center or something like that. If that happens, if we do not find it, we will still be able to tell you exactly where to look for it. So, either way, I think four years from now we will be able to tell you if there is a planet out there or not.
Dean Regas: And if you do not see it, then nobody will see it, right?
Mario Jurić: If it exists, if we do not see it, it is probably not something that is one of these planets that are being theorized. Now, there still might be something even further out, but not one of these Planet Nine objects that we hope is out there. But for me personally, this is one of the most interesting things to look for. It would be amazing if we found an object the size of Neptune out there. It would rewrite the textbooks about how the solar system was put together. If it turned out we have got more planets out there, that would be wonderful.
Dean Regas: I think most astronomers have their bets placed that if anybody finds it, Rubin will. And so hopefully next time we talk, we will have a new planet to talk about. But in the meantime, how far along is the first wave of the sky survey, you know, something that is going to map the entire sky?
Mario Jurić: Yeah. We got a first image about a year ago. In these kinds of projects, the first image is not the end. It is really the beginning of putting everything together. So, we spent the next year tuning the telescope, making sure that the images are as sharp as possible, that it moves as fast as it can go, and so on. And we are just about ready to start that official survey of the sky. Now, in the meantime, as I mentioned, we have done a lot of engineering observations. We have discovered tens of thousands of asteroids just by trying to fine-tune the telescope. But the real dataset is just about to begin.
We have discovered tens of thousands of asteroids just by trying to fine-tune the telescope. But the real dataset is just about to begin.
Dean Regas: And so, is this something that we can use this data from Rubin to show how things have changed in the universe, you know, comparing this to some older data, older photographs, that kind of thing?
Mario Jurić: Short answer is yes. So, both to older data, but also to Rubin's own data from before. So, we will visit every part of the sky about a thousand times over the next 10 years, over the next decade. And by the time the decade is out, even stars move. So, in 10 years, you will be able to tell: Oh, look at this star we have seen in 2026 and 2036. It is not here; now it is there. So, we will be able to see how stars change, move, and pulsate, as well as how supernovae explode. We are going to have thousands of supernovae detected every night. Everything, that is kind of like a movie of the sky that is put in a database for our viewing pleasure. So it will be quite fun.
Dean Regas: And now that we have mentioned Planet Nine, outside of finding a new planet, what other thing are you most looking for that this might discover?
Mario Jurić: There are things I look forward to, and there are things I do not look forward to. So let me start with the ones that I do look forward to. Astronomy is, I think, one of the oldest sciences on Earth, and yet we know embarrassingly little about what the universe is made out of. All the matter, everything we see and feel and touch and breathe, it is less than 5% of what is out there. And then the next 25% is what we call dark matter, which is a fancy way of saying there is something out there that is pulling galaxies and stars around, but we cannot really tell what. And we do not know what it is. We think it is a particle, but we have not detected it. We are not sure.
And then, just to make things worse, 70% of all the energy in the universe is in this new, mysterious compound called dark energy. And we have very little clue of what that is. One of the big goals for Rubin is to collect enough data to try to answer those two questions. Now, on the topic of what I hope we do not discover: The other things we are going to be very efficient at, as we already talked about, is discovering asteroids, including those that are very, very nearby.
There are asteroids that come close to Earth. They occasionally impact. The dinosaurs found that out the hard way 65 million years ago. And if there is such an object, Rubin is going to catalog about 80% of those that are dangerous to the Earth. So, this is one discovery that I hope not to make. But if we do make it, we hope to discover such an object maybe decades before it can potentially impact the Earth, because that gives us enough time. Because there is one thing that we have that the dinosaurs did not: and that is a space program.
Dean Regas: I do not know. I think we find this object that is coming at us that you do not want to find, and we call it Dr. Mario. I think, you know, you put your name on it, you might fall in love with it. That is the only problem.
Mario Jurić: Oh, I am going to be the first one figuring out ways to shoot it down.
Dean Regas: That is right. I can see the headline: "Dr. Mario Saves the World From Dr. Mario the Asteroid." This is going to be pretty good. That article writes itself. Don't Look Up.
Mario Jurić: Don't Look Up. Exactly.
Dean Regas: No, that is what we need you to do. That is what we are here for. That is what we are waiting for you to see and to save us all. Well, Mario, this has been so much fun talking about this. I know we are just getting started with Vera Rubin and the observatory there. I cannot wait to see what the next nine years do for the survey. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Mario Jurić: Thank you. It has been a pleasure.
Dean Regas: I am always amazed by the engineering that goes into the creation of a modern telescope. I mean, the Vera Rubin Telescope is impressive, massive, a little different in design, but how do you make such a large mirror, a piece of glass 8.4 meters in diameter?
Well, if you go to the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona, below the university's football stadium there in Tucson, Arizona, insulated from the cheering sports fans, is the leading telescope mirror manufacturer in the world, the place where the mirror for the Vera Rubin Observatory was made. Yeah, and I know we will totally do an entire episode about this cool place soon, I promise.
In the meantime, a former guest on Looking Up, Vannessa Gressieux, who used to work for the Mirror Lab and now works for NOIRLab, which helps manage lots of telescopes on Kitt Peak and in Chile, including Rubin, told me a bit about the mirror-making process.
Vannessa Gressieux: Generally speaking, for projects like Vera Rubin, the amount of glass you need for just one 8.4-meter telescope, you need about 20 tons-ish, right? So, what they do is they create a cast honeycomb mold of the telescope you want to make, so they can make something as small as a 1-meter telescope, or they can make something as large as an 8.4-meter.
It is the largest fabricated mirror in the world. They hand-place every piece of 5- to 7-pound, irregular-shaped glass pieces, hand-placed to make sure that it is even and balanced. It is lighter than Styrofoam and just as scratchy, like you can scratch it really easily. So, you have to hand-place these pieces on top so you do not crumble it.
Dean Regas: Once the mirror is all ready to go, ground to near perfection…
Vannessa Gressieux: …This blue protective coat was placed on it very carefully, as you would imagine, because they just spent a long time grinding and polishing this down to perfection. And when I say down to perfection, they do not really like the P-word there.
Dean Regas: They have to pack it up carefully. Then they have to load it on a truck, then ship it on a boat for weeks down to Chile, then truck it up to the mountaintop, and do not break it. Please do not break it. Do you think they had the big crate marked as fragile? I know I would. But when it arrived in Chile, it was just a hunk of glass, a perfectly shaped piece of glass.
Vannessa Gressieux: They do not really like the P-word there.
Dean Regas: An almost perfectly shaped piece of glass. And there they had to coat it with the tiniest, thinnest layer of reflective material in order for the starlight they are collecting to bounce into the giant camera. The 8.4-meter piece of glass now has a reflective coating, only a few atoms thick. Then carefully install the glass, turned to mirror, and voila, you got a telescope.
Yeah, that only took like a decade or so. And now the Vera Rubin Telescope is just beginning a 10-year survey of, well, everything. What will it find? If the first results are any indication: lots of asteroids, trans-Neptunian planets, and changing structure of the universe. We will keep tabs on it and report back as the survey progresses, but you can follow along too at www.rubinobservatory.org.
Looking up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen and Carlos Lopez Cornu produce and edit our show and really want two of these new asteroids named after them.
Jenell Walton is our Vice President of Content, and Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager. Our theme song is, “Possible Light” by Ziv Moran. Our social media coordinator is Hannah McFarland, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas, keep looking up!
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