LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Integration and verification testing of the LSST camera

International audienceThe Integration and Verification Testing of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Camera is described. The LSST Camera will be the largest astronomical camera ever constructed, featuring a 3.2 giga-pixel focal plane mosaic of 189 CCDs with in-vacuum controllers and readout, dedicated guider and wavefront CCDs, a three element corrector with a 1.6-meter diameter initial optic, six optical filters covering wavelengths from 320 to 1000 nm with a novel filter exchange mechanism, and camera-control and data acquisition capable of digitizing each image in two seconds. In this paper, we describe the integration processes under way to assemble the Camera and the associated verification testing program. The Camera assembly proceeds along two parallel paths: one for the focal plane and cryostat and the other for the Camera structure itself. A range of verification tests will be performed interspersed with assembly to verify design requirements with a test-as-you-build methodology. Ultimately, the cryostat will be installed into the Camera structure as the two assembly paths merge, and a suite of final Camera system tests performed. The LSST Camera is scheduled for completion and delivery to the LSST observatory in 2020