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.
Woo hoo! Congratulations to the Construction Project team for a job well done, and to the Operations team for taking the reigns after years of careful prep work.
Thanks very much. I will look forward to what the Vera Rubin telescope reveals about Hubble’s Constant. Will your results also be published on Wikipedia’s Hubbles Law page?
Best regards, David Hine.
Congratulations on a remarkable achievement — the start of operations marks an extraordinary milestone for history, for the Rubin Observatory, and for everyone involved.
So wonderful to see it finally starting do to science!
I worked on the data management design more than 10 years ago and although the architecture I defined has certainly paced industry I am very proud of all the people who worked on it over the many years…
I am sure the results from Rubin’s cosmology probes will appear on many public pages and space as the survey progresses. Cosmology results take time, so don’t expect it too soon. But do stay tuned.
As you’re the chief of operations, I hope everything will be done from the launch of the LSST (already in Year 1) to search for distant TNOs (at least those <300 AU), by performing triplets of >2 hrs at least once a week (or any other technique allowing their discovery), as the SCOC wisely proposed, because with only 30-minute tracklets we’ll only be able to detect objects at less than 75 AU (or hardly more)…
(and the Rolling Cadence technique apparently won’t be implemented in the first year.)
It would be really too bad to have to wait until Year 2 to discover these magnificent objects at 75-300AU (some of them very big for sure) that will tell us so much about what the criteria defining a planet in the solar system should be! (Which, for now, have remained vague since 2006…)
I’m eager to see the new discoveries that the LSST promises regarding the outer solar system! (Beyond the Kuiper Belt’s Cliff, i.e. semi-major-axis >50AU and especially semi-major-axis 50-135 AU, which means an Aphelion of maximum 250AU, so objects at a distance of less than 250AU).
Where can we find guidance on the DP2 content? It’s a little difficult to sort through what exactly the SV did and what is included? [area on sky, number of observations in each filter, etc.].
Many of us might be working on NSF proposals where DP2 will be available in the first year of the grant but DR1 will not yet be, and so it’s critical to understand this within the next few weeks. (Of course, we all understand that the details may change as the data is processed and DP2 is prepared.)
