Science Programs

In a ten-year survey, the LSST will take more than five million exposures, collecting over 32 petabytes of raw image data to produce a deep, time-dependent, multi-color movie of 30,000 square degrees of sky. The sequence, or cadence, with which these exposures are made is essential to achieving multiple scientific goals from a single survey, an important feature of the LSST concept.

The basic characteristics of the LSST facility derives directly from its science programs. The telescope itself must have a wide field of view in order to obtain several hundred images of each area of the sky over an entire hemisphere in only 10 years. The aperture must be large in order to achieve the sensitivity required to reach faint limiting magnitudes. The wavelength coverage must be broad in order to derive photometric redshifts and to characterize the ages and metallicities of stellar populations.

Overview

The goal of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory project is to conduct the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). LSST will deliver a 500 petabyte set of images and data products that will address some of the most pressing questions about the structure and evolution of the universe and the objects in it. The Rubin Observatory LSST is designed to address four science areas:

• Probing dark energy and dark matter.
• Taking an inventory of the solar system.
• Exploring the transient optical sky.
• Mapping the Milky Way.

Data Management is responsible for creating the software, services and systems which will be used to produce Rubin Observatory's data products. If you are interested in installing the pipeline software jump to pipelines.lsst.io.

The Rubin Observatory LSST Camera is the largest digital camera ever constructed. At about 5.5 ft (1.65 m) by 9.8 ft (3 m), it's roughly the size of a small car and weighs almost 6200 lbs (2800 kg). It is a large-aperture, wide-field optical imager capable of viewing light from the near ultraviolet to near infrared (0.3-1 μm) wavelengths. The LSST Camera is designed to provide a 3.5-degree field of view, with its 10 μm pixels capable of 0.2 arcsecond sampling for optimized pixel sensitivity vs pixel resolution.

Telescope and Site is a subsystem of the Rubin Observatory which includes the telescope itself, as well as the buildings and facilities needed to support the operations and maintenance of Rubin Observatory.