On a mountaintop at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, the world’s newest telescope is poised to begin a revolutionary survey of the southern hemisphere’s observable universe, one that promises to see more galaxies than ever seen before as well as millions of previously unidentified asteroids roaming our solar system. The first batch of test images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is scheduled to be released Monday at 11:30 a.m., followed by a news conference at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. “We will see basically across the universe, the known universe,” Bob Blum, the director of operations for the observatory, told The Washington Post last week. “Rubin is a big diameter telescope and a wide field of view, so it’s going to look at the sky and go deep and wide, constantly and relentlessly.” Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the Rubin is named for a pioneering astronomer who many argue should have won a Nobel Prize for helping to discover dark matter. The telescope’s defining feature is a 3,200 megapixel camera, the largest digital camera on Earth, according to the Rubin team. “It’s basically the size of a small car and weighs something like 6,000 pounds,” said Victor Krabbendam, project manager for the construction of the telescope. The telescope’s primary mirror is unlike that of any other telescope. It is 27.6 feet in diameter, roughly the length of a stretch limo. But it is actually two mirrors, with different curvatures, the smaller mirror nestled in the heart of the larger one, both forming a single piece of glass. That structure, combined with the big camera, allows the Rubin to survey the sky in the southern hemisphere comprehensively and quickly. It will see not only billions of stars and galaxies, but also comets, flaring supernovas, or space rocks passing within sniffing distance of Earth. Massive amounts of data will then be distributed immediately to the global astronomy community. The Rubin will be, in effect, a first-alert system for astronomers, saying: Look over here, pronto. Adam Riess, a Nobel Prize-winning Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist who is not part of the Rubin team, said the speed with which the observatory can flag interesting objects for further study will be revolutionary. “In the old days, an astronomer had an idea, wrote a proposal, got rejected, resubmitted it, got the time, went to the telescope, got weathered out, tried again, got the data, reduced it, analyzed it, learned something (possibly profound), and then informed the world,” Riess said in an email. “Rubin will change the paradigm by cutting the first 75% of that out and reduce the time from idea to answer.” Some telescopes, like the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, have small fields of view, as if looking into space through a straw, and they might stare at a single object for hours, or even days, or in some rare cases for a couple of weeks. But the Rubin is so wide-eyed it can produce high-resolution images of patches of the sky the size of 45 full moons. And no one is terribly worried about clouds spoiling the heavenly survey. The observatory sits at an elevation of 8,684 feet on a mountain, Cerro Pachón, at the edge of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. The atmosphere there is remarkably stable, ideal for sharp images of stars and other objects. The Rubin will soon begin a 10-year survey of the entire sky in the southern hemisphere, enabling the creation of time-lapse videos of the motion of galaxies. On cosmic timescales, galaxies are moving away from one another as the space between them expands, a process that has been going on since the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago. That expansion has been accelerating, scientists discovered in 1998, and they attribute the acceleration to a mysterious energy field they call dark energy. Between dark energy and dark matter, there’s a lot of darkness out there in space. “Rubin has enormous potential to help us understand what dark energy really is,” Aaron Roodman, a deputy director of Rubin construction, told reporters in a webinar earlier this month. The 10-year survey will allow the creation of, in the words of the Rubin media packet, “an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition, time-lapse record — the largest astronomical movie of all time.” Artificial satellites, which are proliferating in orbit, can leave streaks on astronomical images, ruining an otherwise pretty picture. The Rubin telescope will rely on software algorithms to identify streaks caused by satellites and subtract them from images. The observatory is named for an astronomer who spent much of her career in the nation’s capital, working at what was then called the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Vera Rubin was best known for her research on the motion of galaxies, leading to the discovery that their rotation defied scientific orthodoxy. The outer edges of galaxies appeared to be influenced by the gravity of something unseen, a substance that did not interact with light. We now call that dark matter. Rubin’s work set the stage for the realization that ordinary matter, made up of protons and neutrons and electrons and so forth, represents only a small fraction of the total matter in the universe. Dark matter is a fundamental element of modern cosmology, and many of her peers believed that Rubin, who died in 2016, deserved to be honored with a Nobel Prize (the prize cannot be awarded posthumously). Rubin is often held up as an example of the way female scientists historically have been overlooked or underappreciated in male-dominated fields such as astronomy. “Her enthusiasm was infectious,” University of Chicago astrophysicist Wendy Freedman said of Rubin via email. “I had the good fortune to spend time with her at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile on a couple of occasions, and her love of the Observatory was palpable. I think that she would be positively delighted at the Rubin Observatory carrying her name.” The observatory is having its star moment at a delicate time for the scientific community, when President Donald Trump has called for massive cuts to the budgets of government science agencies, including the National Science Foundation and NASA’s science mission directorate . The Rubin, however, would maintain funding under the proposed budget. The Rubin is the newest major telescope to reach “first light” in what has been called a “golden age of astronomy.” Bigger telescopes, on land and in space, are pairing with more advanced instruments to see deeper into the universe, further back in time, and with greater resolution. NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in less than two years. The European Southern Observatory is building in Chile an extremely large telescope named, of all things, the Extremely Large Telescope.