The world’s astronomers are eagerly holding their breath for the moment the Vera Rubin Observatory switches on its telescope, a state-of-the-art device with a 3,200-megapixel camera—the largest ever built. The telescope is set to take detailed images of the sky for 10 years, fueling the discovery of new asteroids, planets, stars, and things we may not even know exist.
That includes, of course, things the U.S. national security community doesn’t want others to see.
The mysterious contact. Back in 2023, the astronomer Željko Ivezić, who is the director of the Vera Rubin Observatory, had to enter a strange set of negotiations with U.S. government officials, according to The Atlantic. Case in point: Ivezić didn’t even know the person he was talking to or the agency they were from.
In fact, he didn’t even know if he was talking to one person or a team or people. (The astronomer spoke to the mysterious person through an intermediary at the National Science Foundation, so he knew the contact was legit).
But although almost everything about the contact was a mystery, their motive was clear as day. They were worried about what the Vera Rubin’s telescope would take pictures of.
The Vera Rubin Observatory. Located on Cerro Pachón, an 8,800-foot mountain in Chile near the capital, the Vera Rubin Observatory will take 1,000 pictures of the night sky every day. It was partly financed by the Department of the Energy and the National Science Foundation, along with private donations from tech billionaires Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates.
Every three days, the observatory’s telescope will take images of the entire night sky, capturing more than 40 billion objects. It will specifically be working on a mission called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, also known as the LSST.
“This is a 10-year survey in which we look at the southern sky every night, and we repeat that every three nights. So we basically create a movie of the southern sky for a decade,” Clare Higgs, the observatory’s outreach specialist, told CNN.
Seeing something you’re not supposed to see. As told by The Atlantic, when the Vera Rubin’s telescope pinpoints an object it hasn’t seen before, it will alert astronomers around the world so they can study it. This is obviously useful when we’re talking about a nearby asteroid, but not so ideal when it comes to secret U.S. spy satellites—as well as other objects like telescope pointing towards Earth—that nobody is supposed to know are there.
Ivezić was worried that the mysterious government representatives would force the observatory to send its daily images to the military before releasing them to the public, which is what happened with the Pan-STARRS project at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. In that case, military officials edited out classified information from the images before sending them back to astronomers.
“You would get back your image, and all the military assets would be blacked out,” Ivezić said, according to the outlet. “It looked like someone had streaked a marker across it, and it had a huge impact on the science that people were able to do.”
The Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera Rubin Observatory.
A $5 million compromise. In the end, Ivezić and the secretive U.S. officials came to a compromise. The astronomer said he agreed to the development of a new $5 million system that would automatically encrypt the images of the full night sky taken by the telescope and send them to a secure facility in California. Again, no one told him what government agency would be footing the bill or who would be processing the images.
Once at the facility, the system would automatically compare the new images to previous images and cut out any new objects it found, including spy satellites, stars, and asteroids. It would then filter out the “secret U.S. assets” and send the altered image to an alert service for astronomers around the world. Three days and eight hours later, the system would release the unaltered image to the world—sufficient time to allow the “secret U.S. assets” to move.
Overall, Ivezić didn’t have anything bad to say about the strange experience. We’ll have to wait until 2025, the year the Vera Rubin Observatory is officially set to switch on, to see the new system in action.
Image | Vera Rubin Observatory
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