As of this week (Oct. 28), the Vera Rubin Observatory staff has declared the project “construction complete”, and begun operations (“Early Operations”, to be explicit). In physical terms, this doesn’t mean much. In legal terms, this means that telescope checkouts and trial runs have not found any nontrivial issues. Certainly, nothing that would reach the level of mechanical or civil re-work. Thus, the construction teams can be dismissed, and all contractual obligations of theirs are declared fulfilled.
The telescope has been taking sky images, but while the bugs are being worked out, the cadence is nothing like the sky survey cadence planned for regular ops: covering the sky every 2-4 nights, pending weather and any system downtime. What remains are to tune the ops procedures, tune the telescope’s finer parameters, and lesser elements like the moon screen, not truly necessary to take an image.
The sky awaits us, if we would only reach out and capture the photons.