Not surprisingly, astronomers can't wait to get their hands on the high-resolution data. A new paper outlines how the huge amounts of data will be processed, organized, and disseminated. The entire process will require several facilities on three continents over the course of the projected 10-year-long survey.

The Rubin Observatory is a ground-based telescope located high in the Chilean Andes. The observatory's 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope will use the highest resolution digital camera in the world that also includes the world's largest fish-eye lens. The camera is roughly the size of a small car and weighs almost 2,800 kg (6,200 lbs). This survey telescope is fast-moving and will be able to scan the entire visible sky in the southern hemisphere every four nights.

"Automated detection and classification of celestial objects will be performed by sophisticated algorithms on high-resolution images to progressively produce an astronomical catalog eventually composed of 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars and their associated physical properties," write Fabio Hernandez, George Beckett, Peter Clark and several other astronomers in their preprint paper posted to arXiv.

The main project for Rubin Observatory is the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and researchers anticipate this project will gather data on more than 5 million asteroid belt objects, 300,000 Jupiter Trojans, 100,000 near-Earth objects, and more than 40,000 Kuiper belt objects. Since Rubin will be able to map the visible night sky every few days, many of these objects will be observed hundreds of times.