I am happy to report that the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has formally begun the operations phase. The Operations team has accepted the responsibility for and authority over the full Observatory. The construction project is substantially complete and will now coordinate remaining activities with the Operations team who are shifting priority to on-sky work every available night.
Science Validation finished in September and a successful engineering shutdown and pre-survey maintenance period was completed last week (as detailed here). On October 26th, the team went back on sky for Early Operations. The as delivered (substantially complete) system is capable of delivering on the LSST science requirements, but we need to produce that performance reliably night in and nigh out. At this time, we expect to start the LSST no earlier than the 31st of December of this year.
As we work on system optimization in Early Operations, we are also focusing on preparing for Data Preview 2 (DP2). DP2 processing is now on a schedule to begin with a pipeline freeze in early December, followed by pilot runs and then DRP processing in mid January for delivery to the community in mid 2026. This will include a selection of SV images taken up through September. We will add any appropriate images (that fall in the SV area including DDFs) for data taken in the next few months. These images will come from on-sky operation of the feature based scheduler (FBS) with the LSST configuration.
