Institute for Advanced Study / Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a new NSF/DOE-funded facility on Cerro Pachón, Chile. It houses the 8.4m Simonyi Survey Telescope and the 3.2 Gigapixel LSSTCam camera. The Observatory achieved first light in 2025. Over a ten-year period (projected to begin in the spring of this year) Rubin will execute the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Enabled by its 9.6 square degree field of view and a cadence covering the sky every 3-4 days to r~24.0 mag, the LSST dataset will dramatically advance numerous area of astronomy and space science from Dark Energy to planetary defense.

In this talk, I will focus on Rubin's potential and early results for Solar System science. I will discuss predictions about small body yields and science opportunities (Kurlander et al., 2025) derived using a new, precise, simulation toolkit, Sorcha (Merritt et al., 2025). These show that Rubin will deliver by far the largest catalog of small bodies to date: 5M+ main-belt asteroids, 100,000+ NEAs, 100,000+ Jupiter Trojans, 40,000+ TNOs, as well as tens of ISOs and imminent impactors (Chow et al.). Many of these population being well sampled and characterized early in the survey, and the sample will be transformational in decoding the history and present structure of the Solar System.

I will finish with presenting the initial results from commissioning: first Rubin discoveries, the estimation of light curves, size, and spin states for about 2,000 objects (including the discovery of fastest-spinning large asteroids, Greenstreet et al. 2026), astrometry and detections of pre-discovery cometary activity on 3I/ATLAS (Chandler et al.), as well as hints of hundreds of new TNOs (including some interesting ones) expected to become public by the time of this talk.

With regular Solar System discoveries from Rubin arriving in just a few months, I hope this colloquium excites us all about the potential of this one-of-a-kind, public, dataset.