In this series of posts, we sit down with a few of the keynote speakers of the 248rd AAS meeting to learn more about them and their research. You can see a full schedule of their talks here, and read our other interviews here!
When Mario Jurić began graduate school, he didn’t expect to spend the next 20+ years of his life working on once-in-a-quarter century projects. The first realization came while writing one of his first papers, when he realized that he had estimated distances to 48 million stars, almost 700 times more stars than any previous paper on a similar topic. Fortunately, Jurić began his PhD at a pivotal time in the history of observational astronomy — the beginning of a new era of digital surveys, which enabled this incredibly dramatic increase in the sheer number of stars, planets, asteroids, and galaxies we could investigate.
“Everything from Dark Comets to Dark Energy”
Now, Jurić is a leader in one of the most ambitious surveys undertaken. In the pristine darkness of the Chilean desert, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 8.4-m Simonyi Survey Telescope will dance around the sky to perform the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), imaging the entire Southern night sky every three nights over the next 10 years. This will be one of the most versatile and accessible datasets ever created: “Rubin is a project that is designed to essentially download the entire sky and then offer it to the community to do all kinds of science. So that means from the same data set, we can do everything from the Solar System all the way out to dark energy.”
Jurić, who is a professor and Senior Data Science Fellow at the University of Washington, is specifically interested in using Rubin to study things closer to home – detecting and characterizing objects such as asteroids and comets whizzing around our Solar System. He is especially excited about the discovery potential of LSST in this subfield: “Rubin has really a chance to revolutionize what we know about the Solar System, and not over 10 years, but over the next 3 or 4…we expect to double the number of known asteroids in the next year and a half or so… tripling them by the end of the survey, and going as far as finding almost a factor of 7 more trans-Neptunian objects, [and] a factor of 2 more, potentially hazardous asteroids.”
Though we reside inside of it, there are still many open questions about the formation and composition of our own Solar System, such as understanding the birth locations of our planets and their migration patterns, or if we have more interstellar visitors like the ʻOumuamua or 3I/ATLAS comets that made international headlines. Jurić believes that with the influx of discoveries from Rubin and the complementary geographic coverage with existing Solar System surveys in the Northern Hemisphere, questions like these will be answerable in the next three years. In fact, he highlights that Rubin has already delivered record-breaking results – while the entire world discovers about 20,000 new asteroids every year, Rubin discovered over 11,000 new asteroids just in its first 1.5 months of operations, and doubled that number three weeks later.
From Plates to Pixels
But Jurić wasn’t always set on dedicating his life to finding small bodies in our Solar System with large surveys. In fact, he credits the “digital revolution” that happened at the turn of the century, when “software became as important as the telescopes and the camera” as a breakthrough that propelled his career and the field of survey astronomy.
In the latter half of the 20th century, astronomers began surveying large swaths of the night sky using photographic plates — glass plates with a light-sensitive emulsion on one side that could capture and preserve images and spectra before the invention of film or charged-couple device (CCD) cameras. Instead of targeting specific objects of interest, sky surveys intend to capture a general region of the sky, letting astronomers create catalogs of objects and their properties such as the positions of stars, spectral classifications, or detecting new comets and asteroids. But photographic plate surveys were tremendous undertakings with many challenges – plates were not very efficient or sensitive, and each plate had to be developed by hand, so capturing hundreds of thousands of them was an extremely labor- and time-intensive process.
Around 2000, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) was born, and astronomers started counting gigabytes instead of plate quantities, swapping unwieldy plate cameras for compact CCDs. SDSS is still ongoing and was groundbreaking in scale, obtaining images and spectra of millions of stars, galaxies, and quasars with a 2.5-m telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
It was during the early years of SDSS that Jurić left his native Croatia to work on exoplanet dynamics for his PhD at Princeton, one of the leading institutions in the SDSS collaboration. This fortunate concurrence catalysed his future career — though his thesis was quite theoretical and computation-heavy, he “got infected with the large survey bug” and immersed himself in survey work for the rest of his career, with Rubin being a constant thread in his work from grad school until the present day. Gravitating towards large, data-intensive surveys that required major advances in computing was natural for Jurić, who also had an interest in computer science, but chose to study physics as it was harder to self-teach: “I kind of figured that I can figure out most of the algorithms myself, but I can’t figure out quantum mechanics on my own, so physics it was.”
Leveling the Cosmic Playing Field
After his brief stint working on exoplanets, Jurić transitioned to using SDSS and later Pan-STARRS, another survey telescope in Hawaii, to work on discovering and characterizing Solar System objects, as well as mapping out the structure of the Milky Way. In 2012, he became a project scientist for data management at the LSST headquarters in Arizona, but missed being in a setting where he could work with students. This led him to apply to his current position at the University of Washington in 2014, one of the four founding members of Rubin with a strong LSST group. Despite being told in his job interview that the telescope would be built by 2016, Jurić fully believes that it was “worth the wait”.
In fact, he encourages everyone to get involved in digging through its data goldmine, likening it to “Walmart on Black Friday, 20 years ago…it’s going to be a rush, a race. Go join the race, get to the shelves first, and, you know, get your favorite toy from Rubin Datastore.” Besides being one of the most versatile datasets, Rubin’s LSST is also poised to be one of the most readily available datasets, with a big emphasis placed on community access. All of its analysis code is open-source and freely available on Rubin’s Github, and access is not limited to any specific country or institution, effectively “democratizing access to science…Everyone gets the same opportunity to, you know, show how good of an idea they have, and that your opportunity is not gated by where you happen to be at some point.“
Despite his excitement about the equal access that LSST affords the astronomical community, Jurić cautions students just starting out in research to “be careful about joining large projects” where the payoff is far in the future. With our knowledge of the universe being rewritten faster than you might perceive in a day-to-day routine, Jurić advises students not to shy away from pursuing novel or out-of-the-box projects “where, you know, you have a small team, and you’re chasing some big idea, and where you’re going to know if that big idea has succeeded or not in the next few years. Because I think that’s the right risk to take.”
Rubin achieved first light last year and is expected to release its second Data Preview this summer before officially beginning its 10-year LSST, keeping Jurić quite busy. That said, with the all-consuming nature of working on a once-in-a-quarter century project, he makes sure to reserve some time out of his busy days to hang out with his kids and family.
This week though, Mario Jurić is giving a Plenary Talk at #AAS248, currently scheduled for Monday, June 15, 2026 at 3:40 PM PT, where you can look forward to learning about some of the first Solar System discoveries and results with Rubin, including some potentially fun new announcements that he can’t wait to share. As Jurić emphasizes, “let’s not let the universe keep secrets from us.”
Astrobite edited by: Natalie Price
Featured Image Credit: AAS
