NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory This week marked the beginning of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a massive effort to observe the sky that comes more than two decades in the making. It could help us to better understand our own solar system and the mysteries of the cosmos, from dark energy and dark matter to the expansion of the universe. Read on to learn more about that, plus other science news that grabbed our attention this week.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which contains the largest digital camera in the world at 3,200 megapixels, has begun its 10-year survey of the universe. Its campaign kicked off on June 30, and for the next decade it will capture a new image roughly every 40 seconds, observing the entire southern sky every few nights. A press release announcing its commencement said its observations will "create an ultrawide, ultrahigh-definition time-lapse record of the universe."
"Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made," Brian Stone of the National Science Foundation said in the announcement. The observatory captured its first images last summer in a test run of its capabilities, producing a remarkable look at millions of galaxies and stars, along with thousands of previously unseen asteroids. Over the course of its decade-long survey, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), it will revisit each point in the sky roughly 800 times, allowing it to record changes and cosmic events. Rubin will take about a thousand images per night, amounting to about ten terabytes of data daily.
"It is embarking on a mission that will redefine modern cosmology and astrophysics," said Darío Gil, Under Secretary for Science at the US Department of Energy. Gil added, "By seeking to understand the enigmatic phenomena of dark energy and dark matter, we are not just observing the stars; we are striving to grasp the fundamental laws that govern our existence."
This week in Research That Makes My Skin Crawl, scientists from Nanyang Technological University Singapore and Waseda University announced that they've developed a tiny diving suit that allows cyborg cockroaches to survive swimming underwater for hours at a time. If you're wondering why, exactly, roaches need to be borg-ified and forced to swim underwater at all, I'm right there with you.
According to the team, cyborg insects have potential for use in search and rescue operations, as they can access spaces that would be inaccessible to humans, animals and larger robots. Cyborg roaches were recently deployed in the field for the first time to assist with search and rescue efforts after a devastating earthquake in Myanmar this spring.
A flooded environment would normally prove a no-go for the cyborg roaches, which are living Madagascar hissing cockroaches fitted with electronic controllers. The flexible diving suit consists of an oxygen-generation tank, a flexible shell and four silicone supply tubes that are attached to the roaches' spiracles, or the openings that they breathe through. The team says these tubes can be removed painlessly afterward without harming the roach. In a paper published this week in Nature Communications , the researchers report that the cyborg robots were able to swim underwater for up to 3 hours with this setup in tests.
Earlier this year, NASA overhauled its plans for lunar exploration, announcing that it was hitting pause on building an orbiting Lunar Gateway space station and would ins…