Sometime in May or June, as the southern hemisphere winter sets in beneath the skies of the Chilean Atacama desert, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will open its dome and the largest digital camera in history will capture its first science-grade image of the cosmos. Under the Atacama’s pristine and stable atmosphere, Rubin will begin a 10-year mission to provide humanity with an extraordinary new vision of the cosmos with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

Twenty-four years in the making, the observatory is a brand new astronomical facility.…