Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2026

49 JULY-AUGUST 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING ful preview of the observatory’s transformative impact on Solar Sys- tem science. Rubin Observatory is a joint pro- gram of NSF NOIRLab and DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Labora- tory, who cooperatively operate Rubin. NOIRLab is managed by the Association of Universities for Re- search in Astronomy (AURA). The submission to MPC comprises approximately one million observa- tions, taken over the span of a month and a half, of over 11,000 new asteroids and more than 80,000 already known asteroids, including some that had previously been ob- served but were later “lost” because their orbits were too uncertain to predict their future locations. You can interact with all of Rubin’s asteroid discoveries in the Rubin Or- bitviewer, which uses real data to provide an intuitive way to explore the structure of our cosmic backyard in three dimensions and in real time. “This first large submission after Rubin First Look is just the tip of the iceberg and shows that the observa- tory is ready,” says Mario Juric, fac- ulty at the University of Washington and Rubin Solar System Lead Scien- tist. “What used to take years or decades to discover, Rubin will un- earth in months. We are beginning to deliver on Rubin’s promise to fun- damentally reshape our inventory of the Solar System and open the door to discoveries we haven’t yet imag- ined.” Among the newly identified objects are 33 previously unknown near- Earth objects (NEOs), which are small asteroids and comets whose closest approach to the Sun is less than 1.3 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. None of the newly discovered NEOs pose a threat to Earth, and the largest is about 500 meters wide. Objects larger than 140 meters are closely tracked as they could cause significant regional