The world’s largest digital camera has just delivered on its promise, catching a massive, fast spinning asteroid in the act and turning a test run into a record setting discovery. The object, designated 2025 MN45, is roughly the size of nearly eight football fields and spins so quickly that it is forcing scientists to rethink how such large bodies can even hold together. I see this find as an early signal that a new era of sky surveys is beginning, one in which the most detailed digital images ever taken of the night sky will routinely reveal extreme objects hiding in plain sight.
The giant camera that turned a test into a discovery
The asteroid was spotted with a 3,200-megapixel instrument that currently holds the title of the world’s largest digital camera, a device built for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time and known simply as the LSST Camera. Astronomers used it to pick out 2025 MN45, a half mile wide object that rotates once every 1.88 m, a combination of size and speed that immediately flagged it as unusual and helped earn it the label of a “super rotator” in early reports on the find from 3,200-megapixel imaging. Astronomers had expected the camera to be powerful, but the fact that it could isolate such a rapidly spinning, relatively small target while it was still in a pre-survey phase underscores just how sensitive this system already is.
Earlier coverage of the discovery stressed that Astronomers were able to measure the asteroid’s size as “nearly eight football fields,” a vivid comparison that helps convey the scale of 2025 MN45 to anyone used to watching an NFL game on Sunday. That same reporting highlighted how the LSST Camera is designed to capture a deep, wide view of our Universe, night after night, building up a dynamic movie of the changing sky rather than a static atlas of stars and galaxies, a capability that made it possible to track the asteroid’s rapid spin and brightness changes over time in the first place, as described in detail when Astronomers laid out the basic parameters of the object.
Inside the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s record-setting machine
The camera that caught 2025 MN45 is mounted on a new telescope in the Chilean Andes, part of a facility officially named the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is purpose built to scan the entire visible sky from its southern vantage point every few nights. Enthusiasts have already been circulating images and specs that emphasize the staggering scale of the system, including the fact that its focal plane packs a 3.2 trillion pixel camera into a single instrument, a figure that dwarfs anything in consumer photography and illustrates why the observatory can pick out faint, fast moving objects so effectively from its perch at the Vera site. The telescope’s location in Chile gives it dark, stable skies and access to a huge swath of the southern celestial hemisphere, which is critical for a survey that aims to catalog everything that moves or changes.
Behind the scenes, the LSST Camera is the product of years of engineering that culminated in the largest digital camera ever constructed being switched on for commissioning, a milestone that was previewed in early video explainers that walked through the instrument’s enormous lenses, filters, and cryogenically cooled sensor array, all of which had to work in concert before the first science quality images could be taken with the largest digital camera ever constructed. The Rubin team has described how the camera’s wide field of view and rapid readout are tuned for survey work rather than narrow, deep exposures, which is why it can catch an object like 2025 MN45 multiple times in a single night and build up a precise light curve that reveals its rotation period and shape.
How 2025 MN45 broke the asteroid spin record
What makes 2025 MN45 stand out is not just its size but its speed, since large asteroids are not supposed to spin this fast without flying apart. The first peer-reviewed analysis based on LSST Camera data focused on this object and concluded that it is nearly the size of eight football fields and rotates so rapidly that it sets a new benchmark for big, fast spinning bodies in the main asteroid belt, a result that immediately pushed it into the category of record breaking objects in our Solar System and showcased the scientific power of the peer-reviewed LSST Camera data. That same work emphasized that the asteroid’s rotation period is short enough that it challenges existing models of how rubble pile asteroids, which are loosely bound collections of rock and dust, can remain intact under such strong centrifugal forces.
In parallel, a formal News Release from the NSF and DOE partnership that funds the observatory framed the discovery as a proof of concept for the entire survey, noting that the NSF and DOE Vera Rubin Observatory had spotted a record breaking asteroid in pre-survey observations and that this was only one of many fast rotators identified in the first batch of data, a sign that the full survey will likely uncover thousands of similar objects once it is fully operational under the NSF and DOE umbrella. The release stressed that the discovery came before the observatory had even begun its formal ten year mission, which means the system is already operating at a level that can deliver headline science results while engineers are still fine tuning its performance.
A flood of new asteroids and “super rotators”
2025 MN45 is not an isolated oddity but part of a broader pattern that is emerging from Rubin’s early data, which has already revealed a population of “super- and ultra-fast-rotating” asteroids that spin far more quickly than typical main belt objects. One analysis counted 19 such extreme rotators among around 1,900 asteroids detected in the initial dataset, a ratio that suggests these fast spinners are more common than previously thought and that earlier surveys simply lacked the cadence and sensitivity to pick them out from the background of slower moving rocks, a conclusion that was drawn after the 1,900 figure was tallied. The presence of so many rapid rotators in a relatively small sample hints that the asteroid belt is a more dynamic and violent environment than the textbook picture of a quiet ring of debris between Mars and Jupiter.
Commentary on the discovery has stressed that the Vera Rubin Observatory is only just beginning to show what it can do, with one early assessment noting that the facility found more asteroids in a few days than astronomers did worldwide over the past two centuries, a striking comparison that captures how a high cadence, wide field survey can transform our inventory of small bodies in the Solar System and usher in what some have called a new era of discovery for the Jan observing campaign. From my perspective, the fact that so many extreme objects surfaced so quickly suggests that the LSST data stream will force a rapid revision of models for asteroid formation, collisional evolution, and internal structure as theorists scramble to explain how these bodies can spin so fast without disintegrating.
What Rubin’s early success means for the decade ahead
The discovery of 2025 MN45 has also become a showcase for the broader scientific ambitions of the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is based in South America and designed to tackle everything from dark energy to near Earth object hazards. Early coverage of the find emphasized that The Vera Rubin Ob telescope is already offering “tantalizing hints” of its capabilities, including the ability to map the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in unprecedented detail and to spot unusual objects that might otherwise slip through the cracks of more targeted observing programs, a point that was underscored when the South America based facility was profiled. I see this as a reminder that survey telescopes do not just fill in gaps in existing catalogs, they change the questions scientists can ask by revealing entire classes of objects that were effectively invisible before.
Some of the most vivid reporting on the discovery has come from on the ground accounts of how the Rubin Observatory team used its LSST Camera in Chile to capture the asteroid’s rapid spin, with one write up noting that the object spins fast enough to set a record and that the story was compelling enough to draw coverage from veteran science journalist Alan Boyle, who highlighted how the Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera in Chile is already delivering the kind of high impact science it was built for, even before the survey formally begins, in a piece that mentioned Alan Boyle by name. From my vantage point, the fact that a commissioning phase result has already produced a peer reviewed paper and a flurry of public interest suggests that the next decade of Rubin data will be defined by similar surprises, with each observing run adding new, extreme entries to the catalog of known asteroids.
Scientists involved in the project have been quick to point out that 2025 MN45 was found using a preliminary data release from the Rubin Observatory, and that this early sample has already revealed the potential to probe conditions during Solar System formation or subsequent collisions by studying how such fast spinning bodies came to be, a theme that has been repeated in interviews with the Scientists who led the analysis of Scientists the object. A separate account of the same discovery, which again credited Vera and the Rubin Observatory team, reinforced that this enormous, record breaking asteroid was identified in the first seven nights of observations, a detail that underscores just how quickly the facility is moving from engineering tests to frontier science as Vera and the Rubin Observatory ramp up operations.
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