An ambitious project to scan the universe has ties to the Bay Area. A telescope with roots in the Bay Area is be part of a project to look deep into space to go back into the history of the universe, as well as learn about what might be coming up in the future. The enormous telescope is inside the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile. Nine years ago, it started getting partially being built at the SLAC National Laboratory in Menlo Park, and now, it is being used to map the night sky. “The Ruben Observatory is gonna cover one fifth of the observable sky every single night, and then do it again, and again, over 10 years.” The goal? Collect 10 terabytes of data a night for a decade from a 3,200-megapixel camera –  the biggest digital camera in the world. “And to stand next to the telescope you really feel the magnitude of this project.” “We expect to observe 20 billion galaxies in our universe, and almost 20 billion stars in the milky way, and that will enable a wide range of different sciences.” Science, like, how and why the universe is expanding and what stars are made of. It just kicked off what it calls a survey of space and time, looking for distant galaxies, as well as objects flying around between us and the sun. “And these are potentially the most dangerous objects, and they can sneak up on us quickly.” ...read more read less