Dear all,
On behalf of the entire Rubin team, we are delighted to tell you that the Legacy Survey of Space and Time has begun! This is a major milestone for Rubin, one that has been reached thanks to an enormous amount of painstaking work by the observatory staff including our in-kind partners and collaborators, and a large amount of dedicated planning, input and feedback from the LSST science community. Many congratulations and a huge thank you to you all.
Here’s a brief summary of what has prompted us to draw the early operations optimization phase to a close and get the survey started. Since November a dedicated “Start the LSST Board,” consisting of the outgoing commissioning leadership and the incoming operations leadership, and chaired by Zeljko, has been monitoring the progress of the early operations optimization team as they and the other Summit Operations teams worked to take the Simonyi Survey Telescope from the LSST-capable instrument built by the Rubin construction Project and tune it up to consistently perform at the sustained high level needed for the LSST. In particular, the SLB monitored the image quality (and in particular, the instrument contribution to it) and the survey speed: in late May they determined that these two key performance indicators had progressed far enough that it was time to change the emphasis at night from engineering tests to survey mode observing, and to start the clock on the LSST.
We will continue to work to improve the performance at the summit throughout LSST Year 1 and beyond, and have some specific plans for how to do that. Pre-LSST observations show that the as-built Simonyi Telescope can already deliver an arcsecond sky survey, and there is a technical pathway to make the ~10% improvement in delivered image quality needed to approximately match the baseline survey simulation and deliver a sub-arcsecond LSST, as required. The Summit Operations teams have also demonstrated the ability to routinely acquire 80% of the ideal number of visits per night when in survey mode, with a clear pathway to increasing this nightly efficiency further. The Board also noted that the time was right: all eight LSST Science Collaborations sent written support for starting the LSST while continuing to improve performance in parallel.
The Board’s recommendation to start the survey was supported by several key documents, which we want to share with you here: see below for links to them, and also to the report capturing the Survey Cadence Optimization Committee’s recommended strategy for the start of the survey, which we will be following. The recommendation and documents were reviewed by the Directorate and the recommendation to start was accepted.
From today onwards we encourage you to follow the progress of the LSST via the Survey Progress webpages, also linked below. We’ll be at the Community Science Assembly this Thursday at 9am Pacific Time to answer your questions about the start of the survey. You can obtain the zoom coordinates here.
We’ll be working to continuously improve all aspects of the Rubin system as the survey proceeds: to do that well we will need your considerable feedback from your detailed science and technical analyses, so please do keep giving it in this forum and others.
Best wishes for a fantastic upcoming decade of LSST science!
Sincerely
Bob & Phil
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Press release: https://rubinobservatory.org/news/action-rubin-lsst-begins
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Rubin Observatory Early Operations On-sky Performance (RTN-122): https://rtn-122.lsst.io
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Image Quality Improvement Plan (SOTN-004): https://sotn-004.lsst.io
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Survey Cadence Optimization Committee’s Survey Start Recommendations (PSTN-057): https://pstn-057.lsst.io
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Updated Early Science Plan (RTN-011): https://rtn-011.lsst.io
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Rubin Observatory “For Scientists” pages: For Scientists | Rubin Observatory
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Survey Progress: Survey Progress — Observing Strategy (linked from the above page)
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General and searchable repository of Rubin documents: https://lsst.io