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Ian Sullivan designs software for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, built on a mountain top in Chile. It is named for the American astronomer many believe should have won the Nobel Prize.
Who’s going to save the Earth from a killer asteroid?
Well, possibly my son, Ian Sullivan.
He’s the local kid from South Eugene High School who is now an astrophysicist, organizing the data from a giant new telescope in Chile. One of his jobs is to map thousands of previously unknown near-Earth objects.
Allow the proud dad to explain — and to share news of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Saving the planet is just one part of the telescope team’s work.
If you’ve followed my “Oregon Trails” columns over the years, you may recall that Ian once launched a rocket from White Sands, New Mexico. As a doctoral student at Caltech he built an infrared camera to take pictures of background radiation from the Big Bang. His goal then was to beat the James Webb telescope into space, hoping to learn more about the origin of the universe. To succeed, he needed to send his camera 120 miles straight up, above the Earth’s infrared light.
The rocket worked. The camera worked. But the project failed because the rocket itself became so hot that it gave off infrared radiation of its own.
At a price tag of over $3 million, the experiment seemed at first like a waste of money, even to a proud dad. But it turns out that giving real rockets to young astrophysicists can be a good investment. How else can they learn rocket science?
After several years building radio telescopes in the desert of Western Australia, Ian signed on to a team with a much bigger astrophysical goal: building the largest telescope camera in the world. The project would take more than 10 years and cost nearly a $1 billion, but it might save the planet.
At first the project had the mumbo-jumbo name: “Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,” or LSST. To find asteroids, the plan was to take high-resolution pictures of the night sky over and over for 10 years. By comparing the pictures, scientists could tell what moved or changed, including previously unknown asteroids.
Seed money for the LSST came from private donors, including $10 million from Bill Gates. Then Congress bought in. The National Science Foundation ponied up half the money, figuring that the giant telescope camera would find supernovas, variable stars and distant galaxies as well as dangerous asteroids.
The rest of the funding came from the Department of Energy. Why? Rumor has it the bureaucrats there were told the telescope could unravel the mystery of “dark energy.” Although it’s true the project might discover what unseen force is causing the universe to fly apart, it’s unlikely dark energy could be tapped to heat our homes.
Construction of the observatory began in 2015 atop Cerro Pachón, an 8,684-foot mountain in the desert of northern Chile, where the sky is dark and cloudless. In 2019, when the giant 28-foot primary mirror was trucked to the mountaintop, the observatory won a new name. Instead of LSST, it would honor Vera Rubin, the American astronomer many believe should have won the Nobel Prize.
Rubin’s research showed that galaxies do not rotate as they should, given the gravity of their visible stars. This was the first evidence of dark matter. We now know that most of the universe seems invisible because it is not lit up in stars.
Ian’s job has been to design the telescope’s software. This doesn’t sound as exciting as launching rockets, but it turns out that most rocket science is drudgery, failure, determination — and only then success.
Consider the challenges Ian’s team faced. The observatory’s camera is the largest in the world, the size of a car, with an optical sensor the size of a garbage can lid. The camera takes a 3.2-gigapixel picture every 35 seconds, producing 1.3 petabytes of data each year.
A petabyte is a thousand times more than a terabyte, which is a thousand times more than a gigabyte. Sorting and storing this much data requires tapping into the largest supercomputers in the country. And yet the project demands that alerts be posted about new discoveries within 60 seconds of observation.
On top of all that, Ian’s software has to detect and delete more than 10,000 man-made satellites that would otherwise confuse the images. Ian shuddered when he told me that Elon Musk’s Starlink project plans to launch another 34,000 satellites into near-Earth orbit.
Satellites are already compromising a third of the Rubin Observatory images. If more satellites are launched, he says, collisions are likely to strew millions of debris fragments around the Earth, effectively blocking telescope research — and any hope of launching rockets with humans safely into space.
Ian lives in Seattle, where he works at the University of Washington. He’s in charge of a team of seven, but winds up handling much of the complicated software work himself.
When the Rubin Observatory became operational last fall, he had hoped for vacation time. In fact, he’s been working harder than ever. Glitches come up that have to be solved. His data is being made accessible to scientists all over the world for free, and they all seem to be barraging him with questions.
Recently Ian flew to Chile to tour the observatory in person. He’d been there once before, but now there was a tone of earnest celebration. Everything was working, with a few hiccups.
Tens of thousands of new asteroids had already been discovered, none of them yet a threat to Earth. The observatory expects to catalog millions of supernovas, 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies.
Ian prolonged his recent visit to Chile for four days, finally taking a genuine vacation. He and a colleague rented a car, drove to a remote hut at the end of a dirt track and hiked into the Andes. The rocky llama trails went straight up for thousands of feet, from forest to an alpine wonderland surrounded by jagged peaks.
I think he learned with me that hiking in the mountains is a stress-free form of astrophysical adventure. Without a rocket, without a telescope, it’s possible to climb close enough to the sky that you’re in a different world — a calmer, saner world above the troubles below.
That, I believe, is the true lure of astrophysics.
Follow this link for a one-minute video tour of the galaxies captured in the Rubin Observatory’s early photo survey. And here’s a one-minute video tour of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulas, captured in detail by the Rubin Observatory’s photo survey.
