The Vera Rubin Observatory

 The Future of Innovation in Review, Day 1 of the 2026 conference, opened with a stunning and dramatic talk and movie by Mario Juric, a long-time astronomer at the University of Washington   https://astro.washington.edu/people/mario-juric.   Juric, a Croatian, talked with enthusiasm to the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile https://rubinobservatory.org/.  That observatory has a web presence stating part of its mission: "Located on a mountaintop in Chile, NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory will capture the cosmos in exaquisite detail.  Using the largest camera ever built, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years and create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our universe" 

The history of how this observatory first came to be, and the major challenges of creating it, is a saga that is fascinating, but I will skip that here, other than to observe that the camera itself was defined to record images with a 3.2 giga-pixel charge-coupled device by far the largest camera yet constructed.  

For FiRe, Juric put forth the radical premise not stated prominently on the Rubin website--the images will all become available for anyone anywhere.   Juric's point was that up until now, astronomers had just a handful of locales where key telescopes exist, and then try to gain user time on those telescopes.  As he noted, this put a premium on places like CalTech (my favorite alma mater) and left folk anywhere else bereft, notably anyone growing up in Croatia where Juric was born and raised.

Just how important might this be?   Well, start with the uniqueness of the images found in the first ten hours of operation: "The NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory has officially begun its journey to map the universe, and it started with a remarkable feat: capturing over 4,000 asteroids, including 2,100 brand new discoveries, in just ten hours of test imaging. "  https://rubinobservatory.org/news/11000-new-asteroids

Add in the charismatic personality of Juric as he described his own perspective: "I’m interested in astronomical ‘Big Data’: developing and applying methods and algorithms that let us use large data sets to answer research questions. Major astronomical surveys of today are routinely collecting hundreds of terabytes of images, creating databases with billions of objects and several billion measurements. Large surveys astronomers are becoming part data scientists. In my research, I go where the data takes me — I’ve worked on topics ranging from asteroids in the Solar System, Galactic structure, to the scale structure of the universe. My current focus is using survey data to understand the structure and evolution of the Milky Way. I also lead the Data Management team for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project to build the largest sky survey ever undertaken."   LSST, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, is the name of the ten-year 'scan the entire sky' project at the Rubin Observatory.

Juric illustrated his talk for FiRe with animated clips and movie clips from Rubin.  Many of these an be accessed at the Rubin gallery site: https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery