This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batson with my good colleague Bob Zimmerman. He keeps the website

behind the black. And we have a new telescope on planet Earth named Vera Rubin. Bob, where is it,

and what is it, and why is it exciting to have first light? Good evening to you. Good evening, John. Yes. It successfully

had first light this week. They've released their first few. I mean, it's got one up on behind the

black of a galaxy cluster. It's quite spectacular. It's located in Chile. It's being built,

it was built by the National Science Foundation, paid for by us, our tax dollars. It was really

the LSS telescope, and its design has the largest camera ever created.

And the idea is to scan the southern sky once every three nights, three to four nights.

You get a full high-resolution image of the entire sky every three or four nights.

And now what that does is it allows you to track any changes that take place.

Very much so.

The reason it was optimized for deep space cosmology to try to figure out and understand

and solve the mysteries of both dark matter and dark energy.

They're different things, but they are different mysteries in the intergalactic space.

And so this was its main purpose, but because it takes these images every three days of the

entire sky, it can do other things, such as discover previously unknown asteroids and comets

and other objects.

In fact, in this original initial first release, they said they've discovered more than 2,000

asteroids right off the back.

And so this is what this telescope will do, and it's kind of cool, and it's great, and

it's a ground-based telescope.

So hopefully modern technology satellites won't hurt its observations too significantly.

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