LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data
Products
ArXiv 0805.2366 (2008)
Authors:
Željko Ivezić, Steven M Kahn, J Anthony Tyson, Bob Abel, Emily Acosta, Robyn Allsman, David Alonso, Yusra AlSayyad, Scott F Anderson, John Andrew, James Roger P Angel, George Z Angeli, Reza Ansari, Pierre Antilogus, Constanza Araujo, Robert Armstrong, Kirk T Arndt, Pierre Astier, Éric Aubourg, Nicole Auza, Tim S Axelrod, Deborah J Bard, Jeff D Barr, Aurelian Barrau, James G Bartlett, Amanda E Bauer, Brian J Bauman, Sylvain Baumont, Andrew C Becker, Jacek Becla, Cristina Beldica, Steve Bellavia, Federica B Bianco, Rahul Biswas, Guillaume Blanc, Jonathan Blazek, Roger D Blandford, Josh S Bloom, Joanne Bogart, Tim W Bond, Anders W Borgland, Kirk Borne, James F Bosch, Dominique Boutigny, Craig A Brackett, Andrew Bradshaw, William Nielsen Brandt, Michael E Brown, James S Bullock, Patricia Burchat, David L Burke, Gianpietro Cagnoli, Daniel Calabrese, Shawn Callahan, Alice L Callen, Srinivasan Chandrasekharan, Glenaver Charles-Emerson, Steve Chesley, Elliott C Cheu, Hsin-Fang Chiang, James Chiang, Carol Chirino, Derek Chow, David R Ciardi, Charles F Claver, Johann Cohen-Tanugi, Joseph J Cockrum, Rebecca Coles, Andrew J Connolly, Kem H Cook, Asantha Cooray, Kevin R Covey, Chris Cribbs, Wei Cui, Roc Cutri, Philip N Daly, Scott F Daniel, Felipe Daruich, Guillaume Daubard, Greg Daues, William Dawson, Francisco Delgado, Alfred Dellapenna, Robert de Peyster, Miguel de Val-Borro, Seth W Digel, Peter Doherty, Richard Dubois, Gregory P Dubois-Felsmann, Josef Durech, Frossie Economou, Michael Eracleous, Henry Ferguson, Enrique Figueroa, Merlin Fisher-Levine, Warren Focke, Michael D Foss, James Frank, Michael D Freemon, Emmanuel Gangler, Eric Gawiser, John C Geary, Perry Gee, Marla Geha, Charles JB Gessner, Robert R Gibson, D Kirk Gilmore, Thomas Glanzman, William Glick, Tatiana Goldina, Daniel A Goldstein, Iain Goodenow, Melissa L Graham, William J Gressler, Philippe Gris, Leanne P Guy, Augustin Guyonnet, Gunther Haller, Ron Harris, Patrick A Hascall, Justine Haupt, Fabio Hernandez, Sven Herrmann, Edward Hileman, Joshua Hoblitt, John A Hodgson, Craig Hogan, Dajun Huang, Michael E Huffer, Patrick Ingraham, Walter R Innes, Suzanne H Jacoby, Bhuvnesh Jain, Fabrice Jammes, James Jee, Tim Jenness, Garrett Jernigan, Darko Jevremović, Kenneth Johns, Anthony S Johnson, Margaret WG Johnson, R Lynne Jones, Claire Juramy-Gilles, Mario Jurić, Jason S Kalirai, Nitya J Kallivayalil, Bryce Kalmbach, Jeffrey P Kantor, Pierre Karst, Mansi M Kasliwal, Heather Kelly, Richard Kessler, Veronica Kinnison, David Kirkby, Lloyd Knox, Ivan V Kotov, Victor L Krabbendam, K Simon Krughoff, Petr Kubánek, John Kuczewski, Shri Kulkarni, John Ku, Nadine R Kurita, Craig S Lage, Ron Lambert, Travis Lange, J Brian Langton, Laurent Le Guillou, Deborah Levine, Ming Liang, Kian-Tat Lim, Chris J Lintott, Kevin E Long, Margaux Lopez, Paul J Lotz, Robert H Lupton, Nate B Lust, Lauren A MacArthur, Ashish Mahabal, Rachel Mandelbaum, Darren S Marsh, Philip J Marshall, Stuart Marshall, Morgan May, Robert McKercher, Michelle McQueen, Joshua Meyers, Myriam Migliore, Michelle Miller, David J Mills, Connor Miraval, Joachim Moeyens, David G Monet, Marc Moniez, Serge Monkewitz, Christopher Montgomery, Fritz Mueller, Gary P Muller, Freddy Muñoz Arancibia, Douglas R Neill, Scott P Newbry, Jean-Yves Nief, Andrei Nomerotski, Martin Nordby, Paul O'Connor, John Oliver, Scot S Olivier, Knut Olsen, William O'Mullane, Sandra Ortiz, Shawn Osier, Russell E Owen, Reynald Pain, Paul E Palecek, John K Parejko, James B Parsons, Nathan M Pease, J Matt Peterson, John R Peterson, Donald L Petravick, ME Libby Petrick, Cathy E Petry, Francesco Pierfederici, Stephen Pietrowicz, Rob Pike, Philip A Pinto, Raymond Plante, Stephen Plate, Paul A Price, Michael Prouza, Veljko Radeka, Jayadev Rajagopal, Andrew P Rasmussen, Nicolas Regnault, Kevin A Reil, David J Reiss, Michael A Reuter, Stephen T Ridgway, Vincent J Riot, Steve Ritz, Sean Robinson, William Roby, Aaron Roodman, Wayne Rosing, Cecille Roucelle, Matthew R Rumore, Stefano Russo, Abhijit Saha, Benoit Sassolas, Terry L Schalk, Pim Schellart, Rafe H Schindler, Samuel Schmidt, Donald P Schneider, Michael D Schneider, William Schoening, German Schumacher, Megan E Schwamb, Jacques Sebag, Brian Selvy, Glenn H Sembroski, Lynn G Seppala, Andrew Serio, Eduardo Serrano, Richard A Shaw, Ian Shipsey, Jonathan Sick, Nicole Silvestri, Colin T Slater, J Allyn Smith, R Chris Smith, Shahram Sobhani, Christine Soldahl, Lisa Storrie-Lombardi, Edward Stover, Michael A Strauss, Rachel A Street, Christopher W Stubbs, Ian S Sullivan, Donald Sweeney, John D Swinbank, Alexander Szalay, Peter Takacs, Stephen A Tether, Jon J Thaler, John Gregg Thayer, Sandrine Thomas, Vaikunth Thukral, Jeffrey Tice, David E Trilling, Max Turri, Richard Van Berg, Daniel Vanden Berk, Kurt Vetter, Francoise Virieux, Tomislav Vucina, William Wahl, Lucianne Walkowicz, Brian Walsh, Christopher W Walter, Daniel L Wang, Shin-Yawn Wang, Michael Warner, Oliver Wiecha, Beth Willman, Scott E Winters, David Wittman, Sidney C Wolff, W Michael Wood-Vasey, Xiuqin Wu, Bo Xin, Peter Yoachim, Hu Zhan
Abstract:
(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in
the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of
science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will
have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is
driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking
an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and
mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at
Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m
effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel
camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second
exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given
night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000
square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$
point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The
project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations
by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with
$\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$,
covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time
will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a
18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the
anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The
remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a
Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products,
including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion
objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.
