LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
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 J. B. 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 W. G. 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, M. E. 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, for the LSST Collaboration
Date: 2008-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

(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.