Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: Overview

By J. Tyson, the Lsst Collaboration. SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2002

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A large wide-field telescope and camera with optical throughput over 200 m2 deg2 -- a factor of 50 beyond what we currently have -- would enable the detection of faint moving or bursting optical objects: from Earth threatening asteroids to energetic events at the edge of the optical universe. An optimized design for LSST is a 8.4 m telescope with a 3 degree field of view and an optical throughput of 260 m2 deg2. With its large throughput and dedicated all-sky monitoring mode, the LSST will reach 24th magnitude in a single 10 second exposure, opening unexplored regions of astronomical parameter space. The heart of the 2.3 Gpixel camera will be an array of imager modules with 10 μm pixels. Once each month LSST will survey up to 14,000 deg2 of the sky with many ~10 second exposures. Over time LSST will survey 30,000 deg2 deeply in multiple bandpasses, enabling innovative investigations ranging from galactic structure to cosmology. This is a shift in paradigm for optical astronomy: from "survey follow-up" to "survey direct science." The resulting real-time data products and fifteen petabyte time-tagged imaging database and photometric catalog will provide a unique resource. A collaboration of ~80 engineers and scientists are gearing up to confront this exciting challenge.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b061bce38d1640a02dc75d5bf656231dc344ca3f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Biomedical Engineering

R. Hickox

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

The Milky Way Tomography with SDSS. I. Stellar Number Density Distribution (2005, background): “A further major leap forward will be enabled by upcoming deep synoptic sky surveys, such as Pan-STARRS (Kaiser et al. 2002) andLSST (Tyson 2002).”
Systematic errors in weak lensing: application to SDSS galaxy-galaxy weak lensing (2005, background): “…Mellier 2001), PanStarrs (http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/, Kaiser et al. 2002; Kaiser 2004), LSST (http://www.lsst.org/lsst home.html, Tyson 2002) and SNAP (http://snap.lbl.gov/, Rhodes et al. 2004; Massey et al. 2004; Refregier et al. 2004), some of which may reach statistical…”
A NEW FAINT MILKY WAY SATELLITE DISCOVERED IN THE PAN-STARRS1 3π SURVEY (2015, background): “…statistics of these systems through more discoveries in current (PS1) and (DES; The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration 2005) or future surveys (LSST; Tyson 2002) is essential if we are to understand the true nature of these incredibly faint stellar systems that can only be found in the MW…”
The Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey (2014, methodology): “The SDSS work on photometric identification represents an important example analysis for ongoing and future large surveys, such as PanSTARRS (Scolnic et al. 2013a; Rest et al. 2013), DES (Bernstein et al. 2012) and LSST (Tyson 2002), where full spectroscopic follow up of all active SN candidates wil”
LOW-RESOLUTION SPECTRAL TEMPLATES FOR ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI AND GALAXIES FROM 0.03 TO 30 μm (2010, background): “Upcoming large photometric surveys such as the groundbased LSST (Tyson 2002), Pan-STARRS (Kaiser 2004), DES (The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration 2005), and UKIDSS (Lawrence et al. 2007) projects, or the space-based WideField Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE; Mainzer et al. 2005) mission, will…”
Sloan Digital Sky Survey Standard Star Catalog for Stripe 82: The Dawn of Industrial 1% Optical Photometry (2007, unknown): “Additional motivation for the analysis of repeated scans and their impact on photometric accuracy comes from upcoming largescale optical surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey (Flaugher et al. 2006), Pan-STARRS (Kaiser et al. 2002), and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST; Tyson 2002).”
The Size Distributions of Asteroid Families in the SDSS Moving Object Catalog 4 (2008, background): “For example, LSST will scan the whole observable sky every three nights in two bands to a 5σ depth equivalent to V = 24.7.”