Second Saturday Science Talk – Millions of New Asteroids: The Legacy Survey of Space and Time

October’s Science Topic – Millions of New Asteroids: The Legacy Survey of Space and Time

11 Oct 2025 18:00 – 20:00 NEW TIME! Register to attend

Speaker: Jake Kurlander, 4th-year University of Washington PhD student

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a new 8m-class survey facility presently being commissioned in Chile, expected to begin the 10 yr long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) by the end of 2025. Observing with an unprecedentedly-fast twice-per-night cadence, it will sweep out the visible southern sky every four nights, gathering far more astronomical data than has been measured by any previous survey. High-fidelity simulations with a cutting-edge solar system model expect LSST to discover  3x−7x more objects than are presently known in each orbital class, making LSST the largest source of data for small body science in this and the following decade. This talk will cover the motivation for small solar system body science, previous surveys, open questions, and how LSST will answer them.

Jake Kurlander is a 4th-year PhD student at the University of Washington. He is writing the asteroid discovery and measurement pipelines for the Rubin Observatory, which will begin the ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the end of this year. He is a Seattle native, loves board games, and works with the eSTEAM program to provide education to incarcerated children in Washington state.

After the talk, stick around for a planetarium show and, if the weather holds, a Star Party.

In-person limited to 30 people, Register to attend

(PSST…we are still looking for members to join our Speakers Bureau! Whether you want to give a scheduled talk, or offer to be a stand-in when our scheduled speaker needs to cancel, we need you!)