The Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC) releases today its Phase 3 recommendation for the LSST Survey Strategy:
PSTN-056
The community is reminded that the SCOC will continue to review the survey strategy throughout the entirety of LSST and update it in response to system performance and the evolving scientific landscape. Leading up to the start of LSST, the SCOC will focus on revising its recommendations in the light of commissioning.
This recommendation is the product of a many-years-long iterative process where community recommendations to maximize the scientific impact of LSST across domains of astrophysics were reviewed, synthesized, aggregated, and merged to define the overall plan for 10 years of LSST observations. The current recommendation builds on Phase 1 (PSTN-053) and Phase 2 recommendations (PSTN-055) and, together, they define a 10-year plan for observing. Here we answer questions left open in PSTN-055, refine additional survey details, and describe the scope of future activities of the SCOC.
The progress made in survey strategy design in the past 10 years has led to important scientific gains across all areas, as demonstrated by the significant improvements in science metrics built by the community. The unprecedented involvement of the scientific community at large in the refinement of the LSST survey strategy has been and continues to be a formidable success and a shining example of constructive collaborative practices in the scientific community