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PSTN-051: Survey Strategy and Cadence Choices for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)

Dataset ·
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [3];  [4]
  1. Dept. of Astronomy, University of Washington
  2. Vera C. Rubin Observatory Project Office; Dept. of Astronomy, University of Washington
  3. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
  4. Vera C. Rubin Observatory Project Office
+ Show Author Affiliations

A summary of survey strategy and cadence choices, simulated and evaluated by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Scheduler Team, prepared for the Survey Cadence and Optimization Committee (SCOC). A large telescope survey, covering the entire visible sky repeatedly every few days in multiple bandpasses over the course of ten years, is the core idea of the LSST. An area of about 20,000 square degrees observed under a wide range of conditions to deep coadded limiting magnitudes in bandpasses ugrizy enables cosmological studies and studies of the Milky Way structure with unprecedented precision; the same survey, when cadenced well, can serve to open new windows into our understanding of transient and variable stars, and extend our knowledge of small bodies throughout the Solar System by orders of magnitude. The outlines of, and some basic necessary requirements for these goals are outlined in the LSST Science Requirements Document (SRD). Finding options for the observing strategy to meet more detailed needs of an even wider range of science goals, as well as building the LSST Scheduler and Metrics Analysis Framework, has been the work of the LSST Scheduler Team with support and input from the astronomical community, including the Community Observing Strategy Evaluation Paper (COSEP), the Call for White Papers, numerous performance metrics, and guidance from the LSST Science Advisory Committee in their Recommendations for Operations Simulator Experiments. This report will help enable the SCOC to make its recommendation for the preferred survey strategy.

Research Organization:
NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
Sponsoring Organization:
U.S. National Science Foundation; U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-76SF00515
OSTI ID:
2584084
Report Number(s):
Vera C. Rubin Observatory Project Science Technical Note PSTN-051
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (15)

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The Pan-STARRS Synthetic Solar System Model: A Tool for Testing and Efficiency Determination of the Moving Object Processing System
  • Grav, Tommy; Jedicke, Robert; Denneau, Larry
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journal April 2011
The Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey—L3 data Release: the Orbital Structure of the Kuiper belt journal May 2009
The Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey—Full data Release: the Orbital Structure of the Kuiper belt journal September 2011
The Zwicky Transient Facility: Surveys and Scheduler journal April 2019
ALTSched: Improved Scheduling for Time-domain Science with LSST journal September 2019
The LSST operations simulator conference August 2014
An optical to IR sky brightness model for the LSST conference July 2016
Testing lsst Dither Strategies for Survey Uniformity and Large-Scale Structure Systematics journal September 2016
A Framework for Telescope Schedulers: With Applications to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope journal March 2019
LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products journal March 2019
An Integer Linear Programming Solution to the Telescope Network Scheduling Problem preprint January 2015

Cited By (3)

RTN-095: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Preview 1 dataset July 2025
PSTN-053: Survey Cadence Optimization Committee's Phase 1 Recommendations dataset January 2022
PSTN-055: Survey Cadence Optimization Committee's Phase 2 Recommendations dataset January 2023

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Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS