An International Facility and Collaboration
The effort to build the LSST is overseen by the LSST Corporation, a partnership between Research Corporation and several other institutions. The Corporation is actively seeking additional member institutions who can make major contributions to the project.
In addition to our institution partners, the LSST is actively being supported and developed by more than one hundred astronomers, physicists, and engineers throughout the country who see the LSST as the next big leap in charting the heavens, an exciting technological challenge, and a new model for doing big science.
Inset is a three-color image of spiral galaxy M109 taken with the 6.5 meter MMT telescope, an example of the superb image quality attainable by modern large telescopes. The background image, from the Palomar Sky Survey, was taken in the 1950s with a 48 inch telescope using photographic plates. Each LSST exposure will cover the same area of the sky as the background image to the same high quality as the inset. This coupling of high resolution, wide aperture, and very wide field makes the LSST unique.
LSST represents a new astronomy unlike what we now have. The changing universe will be unveiled, and people everywhere will derive new meaning and understanding from it. In principle, all of the data taken by LSST will be immediately available to the public, and access through the internet will make it a truly international project. It will allow astronomers everywhere access to high-quality scientific data, without regard to their nationality or the wealth of their home institution. Accessing petabytes of data over the internet will have practical limitations. Internet access to the master maps, to the catalogues of objects discovered, and to the most recent few weeks of images is possible with present internet technology. Accessing petabytes of data over the internet will have practical limitations; some users will want disks containing many terabytes of data.
Full access to the database and the processing power to perform the most complex queries will be accommodated by a grants program similar to that used to allocate telescope time today. Scientists will place their own computers next to LSST disk farms located around the world, for data mining and analysis. The LSST team of scientists will pursue several key scientific investigations with their own deliverables, ensuring LSST data quality control.
A movement toward a Global Virtual Observatory is underway — an attempt to join all astronomical data archives in one great astronomical web. Such a vision will both benefit by, and contribute to, LSST, whose database will become a large part of such a system. Conversely, the data sources and software developed for the Virtual Observatory will contribute in an important way to the LSST project.
For non-scientists, LSST will become a remarkable window on the universe. The public will have web access to derived data products such as up-to-date digital movies of the changing sky. "LSST at Home" software could allow the home PC of the future to process time streams of data from one patch of sky. Museums and planetariums will have "video walls" showing LSST's wide-sky dynamic view of the changing universe. A web-based atlas of the universe would show not only the latest images, but also identifications of as many objects as the database provides, linked to descriptions of these objects and suggestions for further reading. This would prove an invaluable resource for teaching science at all levels. A fifth-grade class will be able to choose part of the sky to "observe" periodically, searching for change and discovering for themselves new supernovae, asteroids, or comets. High-school students will be able to "fly" through a three-dimensional map of our solar neighborhood with tens of thousands of new asteroids.
OVER 100 scientists and engineers, with expertise ranging from optics to computer science, are collaborating on the LSST design, which is driven by the requirements of the key science missions of LSST. These disparate science programs — from surveys of the near-Earth environment to cosmic dark energy to cataclysmic explosions at the edge of the visible universe — all require a facility which can image very faint objects quickly. Indeed, they each require the same data, for different reasons: multiple short exposures of every patch of visible sky with frequent revisits. Thus, a single optimized data acquisition strategy will supply data to these key programs for specialized analysis. The LSST collaboration is committed to minimizing risk and the cost while maximizing the science. To be run more like an industrial production line than like current multi-user observatories, LSST will be manned by multiple shifts of operations and data professionals, and will deliver a steady stream of processed data to the key projects and the LSST data archive. By distributing this data immediately to the community, LSST will ensure the widest opportunity for great science and serendipitous discovery.
