Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: From science drivers to reference design

Abstract

In the history of astronomy, major advances in our understanding of the Universe have come from dramatic improvements in our ability to accurately measure astronomical quantities. Aided by rapid progress in information technology, current sky surveys are changing the way we view and study the Universe. Next- generation surveys will maintain this revolutionary progress. We focus here on the most ambitious survey currently planned in the visible band, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: constraining dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. It will be a large, wide-field ground-based system designed to obtain multiple images covering the sky that is visible from Cerro Pachon in Northern Chile. The current baseline design, with an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg2 field of view, and a 3,200 Megapixel camera, will allow about 10,000 square degrees of sky to be covered using pairs of 15-second exposures in two photometric bands every three nights on average. The system is designed to yield high image quality, as well as superb astrometric and photometric accuracy. The survey area will include 30,000 deg2 with ? < +34.5? , 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 observe a 20,000 deg2 region about 1000 times in the six bands during the anticipated 10 years of operation. These data will result in databases including 10 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars, and will serve the majority of science programs. The remaining 10% of the observing time will be allocated to special programs such as Very Deep and Very Fast time domain surveys. We describe how the LSST science drivers led to these choices of system parameters.

BANYAN. IX. The Initial Mass Function and Planetary-mass Object Space Density of the TW HYA Association

“…It will however be challenging to identify them due to the relatively short temporal baseline between these surveys (∼ 1 yr), which makes it impossible to derive proper motions at the ∼ 10 mas yr −1 precision using the survey data alone. Future surveys such as LSST (Ivezić et al 2008) and MaxWISE will be able to reveal the population of TWA members well into the planetary-mass regime at distances up to 80 pc. (Ochsenbein et al 2000); data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS ; Skrutskie et al 2006;Kirkpatrick et al 2003), which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)/California Institute of Technology (Caltech), funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (Skrutskie et al 2006); data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE ; Wright et al 2010) The authors recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community.…”

Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): Exploring the WISE Web in G12

“…This dual approach is motivated by the fact that WISE is a whole-sky survey. The next-generation large-area surveys, including the SKA-pathfinder radio HI (e.g., WALLABY, Koribalski 2012) and continuum surveys (MIGHTEE, Jarvis 2012, EMU, Norris et al 2011), LSST (Ivezic et al 2008), VIKING (Edge et al 2013) and KiDS (de Jong et al 2013), will require ancillary multiwavelength data to make sense of their new source populations, and all-sky surveys such as WISE are particularly useful to this end. Consequently, it is vital that we understand the WISE source population and its suitability of probing clustering on small and large scales, from local galaxies to those in the early Universe that drive the key science goals of deep radio surveys.…”

A Spectroscopically Confirmed Double Source Plane Lens System in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program

“…This Letter is based on the S15A internal data release. The data are processed with hscPipe v3.8.5, a version of Large Synoptic Survey Telescope pipeline (Ivezic et al 2008;Axelrod et al 2010) calibrated against Pan-STARRS1 ( Schlafly et al 2012;Tonry et al 2012;Magnier et al 2013). A summary of the HSC data on this system is given in Table 1.…”