The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to transform asteroid discovery, and I couldn’t be more excited. For over a decade now, we’ve watched the building of this revolutionary telescope, all the while our Asteroid Institute has been creating open, scalable software to support these discoveries.

Mapping the solar system is no small feat—asteroids vastly outnumber other objects in our solar system, and most remain untracked. But that will soon change. Rubin will increase asteroid discovery rates by a factor of 10 compared to all previous observatories combined.

Soon, a vast new dataset will be publicly available—and we’re anxious to comb through it. Our Asteroid Institute will help make this data more accessible to others through our open-source algorithms. I cannot stress enough how important this moment is for the future of humanity.

Now, let’s see what discoveries await in those images!

Dr. Ed Lu
Cofounder, B612
Executive Director, Asteroid Institute