Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: From Science Drivers to Reference Design

By Željko Ivezic´, T. Axelrod, W. N. Brandt, David L. Burke, C. Claver, Andrew J. Connolly, K. Cook, P. Gee, D. Gilmore, S. Jacoby and 16 more. 2008

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 deg{sup 2} 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 deg{sup 2} with {delta} < +34.5{sup o}, 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 deg{sup 2} 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.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d32a90ff1b55fcbaf72a0be93572857fc2f8cf4

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Citations in the corpus

THE FINAL SDSS HIGH-REDSHIFT QUASAR SAMPLE OF 52 QUASARS AT z > 5.7 (2016, background): “The future LSST survey (Ivezic et al. 2008) will have an unprecedented power for searches of high-redshift quasars.”
LIFTING THE DUSTY VEIL WITH NEAR- AND MID-INFRARED PHOTOMETRY. I. DESCRIPTION AND APPLICATIONS OF THE RAYLEIGH–JEANS COLOR EXCESS METHOD (2011, methodology): “…Skrutskie et al. 2006), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, York et al. 2000), and UKIDSS (Lucas et al. 2008), and will be expected to continue with future endeavors like PAN-STARRS (Kaiser et al. 2002), the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (Ivezic et al. 2008), and Sky-Mapper (Keller et al. 2007).”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DATA RELEASE 7 SPECTROSCOPIC M DWARF CATALOG. I. DATA (2011, background): “This relation will be useful for source identification in upcoming large photometric surveys such as Pan-STARRS and LSST. 4.”
Sweating the small stuff: simulating dwarf galaxies, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and their own tiny satellites (2015, background): “…near future, largearea, deep-sky surveys such as LSST, DES, PanSTARRS, and SkyMapper will push current detection limits to lower surface brightness and may be able to see ultra-faint satellites of isolated dwarf galaxies if they exist (Ivezic et al. 2008; Kaiser et al. 2002; Keller et al. 2007).”
THE CANADA–FRANCE ECLIPTIC PLANE SURVEY—L3 DATA RELEASE: THE ORBITAL STRUCTURE OF THE KUIPER BELT (2009, methodology): “The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) (Ivezic et al. 2008) should certainly firm up the793 main-belt dynamical sub-structure along with the colour and size distributions for those components.794 A. Appendix A795 In this Appendix, we give details of the algorithm used to generate the CFEPS-L7…”
Illuminating Low Surface Brightness Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “…our ongoing Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP; Aihara et al. 2018b), and ultimately the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST; Ivezic et al. 2008) will extend our census of the galaxy population to lower surface brightnesses than has previously been possible over large areas…”