This isn’t news to anyone already in the loop, but… a Rubin Observatory presser spells it out for those who aren’t. The sky survey by Vera Rubin might as well be a long, heavy asteroid mission:
Rubin Observatory will Inspire a New Era in Space Missions Without Ever Leaving the Ground
VRO scientist Siegfried Eggl explains how, with an 8-meter telescope and its unprecedented field of view (square degrees, not square arcmin), the search program (which is, to an extent, its own follow-up) will give us the depth and breadth to understand asteroids, comets, and by extension the Solar System. The sky coverage (area times revisit cadence) is great enough that Rubin will just follow up new objects without even trying- Rubin will ‘catch’ them again and again, on various timescales, giving various properties. In aggregate, the body of VRO data will be “data-mined” by scientists, from multiple subdisciplines, including asteroid/comet/etc. scientists. Properties will emerge from the collective knowledge in the database. The database, that is, which will be so huge we are writing new programs just to digest the torrent. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is leading the ground “digestion” effort and will still need help from UK (STFC) and French (IN2P3) high-performance computing centers.
Try grasping what the telescope will soon (test runs late this year) collect. Vera Rubin will gather so many photons, using so many pixels (3.2 GP, or 3,200 megapixels), at so high a survey cadence, that existing computers can’t even deal. By comparison, Pioneer 10 first crossed the asteroid belt with 1) a particle counter (detecting hits from dust), 2) a stereoscopic dust ‘trap’ (detecting sun glints from passing meteoroids, and distinguishing them from background stars), and 3) a linescan camera- a four-pixel instrument that built an image like those old black-and-white TVs. And those four pixels were four, total- two “red” ones and two “blue.”
When the James Webb Space Telescope was being finalized and built, it was proposed to be comparable to an outer Solar System mission. That is, its sensitivity and resolution was planned to be comparable to sending a probe with a typical (at the time, ~1 megapixel) onboard camera. Vera Rubin won’t have the image sharpness or low-light sensitivity of James Webb, but neither will a Solar System probe examine tens of thousands of NEOs, over a million main-belters, many thousands of comets of all types, and more than a couple interstellar objects.
Try grasping if you can even grasp what “it” signifies.