Operations Updates

A Brief Introduction to Rubin Observatory

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is located on Cerro Pachón in Chile. The Simonyi Survey Telescope’s primary mirror has an 8.4 meter diameter and its camera has a 9.6 deg² field-of-view. Once construction and commissioning are complete (projected to be late 2023), Rubin Observatory will execute the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which was designed to make major advances in four core science areas: understanding dark matter and dark energy, hazardous asteroids and the remote Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and the formation and structure of the Milky Way. 

Rubin Observatory’s LSST Science Pipelines will process the images in real time, creating prompt data products for time-domain astronomy, and also create yearly data releases of deep coadd images and catalogs. The Rubin Science Platform (RSP) will serve as a portal to the data and provide next-to-the-data resources for data analysis and the creation of user-generated data products.

Get Involved in Preparing to do Science with Rubin Observatory

There are several ways that you can get involved in preparing to do science with Rubin Observatory.

• Join an LSST Science Collaboration. The Science Collaborations are independent worldwide communities of scientists at a variety of career stages, self-organized into working groups based on research interests, actively preparing to do science with Rubin Observatory and the LSST. Science Collaboration membership is open to all, and students are especially welcome. Joining a Science Collaboration does not require a big commitment and is a great way to learn about Rubin Observatory and the LSST.

• Make an account at Community.lsst.org, the Rubin Observatory Community Forum, our virtual environment for news, collaboration, and support. Much of the content is publicly viewable, and anyone may create an account to participate in the discussion.

• Respond to an open call for feedback about LSST survey simulations. The Rubin Observatory Survey Scheduler Team and the LSST Science Collaborations are working together to optimize the LSST survey strategy, and scientific expertise in evaluating the simulations is requested by the Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC).

• Consider participating in Data Preview 0 (DP0). In mid-2021, Rubin Observatory will make simulated LSST-like data products available in the Rubin Science Platform (RSP) for up to 300 scientists (including students). Find out more about this opportunity and the application process by attending a “DP0 Info Session” at the Rubin AAS exhibit hall booth on Wed at 2pm and Thu at 3pm ET.

Will the Rubin Observatory data be public?

As described in the Data Policy (RDO-013), all astronomers working in the US and Chile have Rubin Observatory data rights (including students), as do named individuals on International Contributor teams. The term “data rights” refers to the right to access, analyze, and publish results based on the proprietary data products and services. The prompt and data release data products have a two-year proprietary period (except for the alert packets, which are world public), and the Rubin Science Platform is a proprietary service. The LSST Science Pipelines, the software that Rubin Observatory is developing to process optical and near-infrared images, are world public and open source.

Within the US, there is no need to be working at a particular institution in order to access, analyze, or publish results based on the Rubin Observatory data products and services.

Where to find more information about Rubin Observatory

Please return to the Rubin Observatory booth in the AAS Exhibit Hall's NSF Pavilion, and chat with us. We look forward to answering your questions!

Visit the “For Scientists” page of the Rubin Observatory website. There you will find more information about the LSST survey strategy and its data products (including alerts and brokers), the LSST Science Collaborations, news and events, key numbers, and glossary and acronym definitions.

Visit the Rubin Observatory Community Forum, Community.lsst.org, where most of the categories and topics are open for public search and browsing, and anyone may create an account in order to participate in the discussions.

Check out some key project documents, such as the LSST Science Book, the Rubin Observatory Data Policy, the Data Products Definitions Document (DPDD), or the journal article “LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products” Ivezić et al. 2019, ApJ, 873, 111.