A timelapse video shows a portion of Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s on-sky commissioning from the night of October 27, 2024 using the 144-megapixel test camera, called the Commissioning Camera (ComCam).
CERRO PACHON, Chile – Driving up the mountain road to reach the U.S. National Science Foundation’s newest observatory in Chile, which will begin observations later this year, astronomer Beth Willman was delighted to see a sign.
“It says ‘Vera C. Rubin Observatory this way,’ and it was a simple but powerful moment for me to realize it was really there,” Willman said.
A quick internet search will reveal why having a woman’s name on a $571 million science facility is a milestone. There are no others like it, and no one like Rubin.
“In the back of my head, I had wanted the National Lab to be named after Vera Rubin because of her incredible leadership and legacy. And I was thrilled to hear that work was already ongoing to name what is now the Vera C. Rubin Observatory after her,” Willman said.
Willman was the deputy director of the Rubin construction project and now serves as the executive director of the LSST Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
Group photo of the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory team before installing the LSST Camera on the Simonyi Survey Telescope in March 2025.
The Observatory’s LSST is the world’s largest digital camera, and it will create the largest astronomical movie yet of the southern hemisphere sky over 10 years. In March, the LSST was installed at the mountaintop observatory in Chile, and the facility has entered the final stages of testing before operations begin in the coming months.
A ‘brilliant woman’ breaking scientific barriers
The U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation-funded facility, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, is named after the astronomer credited with the first evidence of dark matter.
Many in the scientific community still believe she was overlooked for the Nobel Prize. Rubin died in 2016 at 88 years old.
“When I think of Vera Rubin, I think of breaking scientific barriers, I think of directly amplifying the future of scientists through training and mentoring future scientists, and I think of the fact that she had to break cultural barriers in order to break scientific barriers,” Willman said.
Left: Vera Rubin looking through a telescope at Vassar College where she studied astronomy in the 1940s. She was the only astronomy major in her graduating class. Right: Rubin analyzing the spectra of stars at the Carnegie Institution in the 1970s, work which led her to confirm dark matter’s existence.
Rubin’s work in the 1970s led to the first evidence that the universe has something we still don’t know what it is, known as dark matter. Fifty years later, scientists know about 80% of the universe is made of dark matter.
“She did that by pioneering studies of galaxies. In order to do her pioneer studies of galaxies she had to go to observatories where women hadn’t been permitted to go before,” Willman said.
Rubin made these discoveries while raising four young children, something Willman relates to: balancing work in a male-dominated field and being a mother.
TELESCOPE USED TO STUDY MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE RELEASES FIRST IMAGES IN STUNNING DETAIL
In 2010, Willman brought her students from Haverford College to listen to Rubin speak at Bryn Mawr College, where she could ask her about this balancing act.
“I took my whole lab of students over there to hear her speak as really a role model and a pioneering example of how somebody can be the leader of their field and change the way we understand the universe while also being a parent,” Willman said.
At the time, as a mom to an 18-month-old daughter, it was top of mind for Willman.
NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located on a mountaintop in Chile, will revolutionize the way we explore the cosmos. 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.
“She said it was about her own support resources that she had in place that in order to accomplish, you look around your community, your family for the support that you need,” Willman recalls. “I was so fascinated by that response. I don’t know what I expected. I expected some, you know, superhero swashbuckling stories. She was just a humble and powerful and brilliant woman, very practical and down to Earth.”
All four of Rubin’s children went on to be scientists, her son, Allan Rubin told the NSF.
The world will soon hear Vera Rubin’s name a lot more for a few reasons. Her face will be on a new quarter released this June, right around the time Rubin Observatory plans to release the first images.
In the decades to come, budding scientists will credit discoveries and new findings to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, building on the work of a celebrated astronomer who sought to inspire others when women didn’t have their own restrooms in some science facilities.