This award supports the continuing design and development of a very large celestial camera, the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope). The LSST will be an 8.4-m diameter, high-performance optical telescope outfitted with a three billion pixel digital camera to be located on a remote, dark, mountain site, at Cerro Pachon, Chile. The project is a collaboration of a large number of institutions, including the Department of Energy (DOE), and has already benefited from a substantial amount of private investment (>$30M).
The LSST Project has established partnerships with other agencies and industry: (i) Several Department of Energy laboratories are funding R&D for the design of the camera and will seek DOE funding for its construction. (ii) The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is providing manpower and high performance computer resources during the LSST research and development phase. (iii) Private contributions have enabled the casting and polishing of the primary and tertiary mirrors which will be on a common borosilicate honeycomb substrate. (iv) Many university-based researchers in fields that cut across numerous fields of astronomy and high energy physics are contributing expertise to develop the science case, telescope design, and detailed operations simulations. (v) The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) is playing a lead role in developing the telescope design and error budget, as well as supporting the activities of the Science Working Group.
Despite the title, this is not in fact the Final Design Phase. A comprehensive design and operations model, with cost estimates, for both the LSST hardware and software will be provided early on during this award, and will form the basis for an NSF-conducted Preliminary Design Review (PDR). If the PDR is passed successfully, the project will then enter its final design phase. The scientific, technical, and managerial groundwork for the construction phase of the LSST will be laid during this phase with particular attention paid to continued reduction and retirement of risk.
The broader impacts of the LSST will be profound, as scientists, the public, and schoolchildren around the world will have ready access to the data. Design and development activities include 1) the training and education of personnel at all levels, integrating state-of-the-art computational science with astrophysics; 2) using existing LSST precursor projects to advance the state-of-the-art in real-time database schema and public access tools; and 3) developing and refining an LSST education and outreach program that will pay near-term dividends in K-adult education. In addition, the community will see significant technical overlap between the LSST and the needs of other imaging systems and software under development in the national security arena.
completed significant work that brings the project closer to readiness for construction. Evidence of this readiness is exhibited in two milestones: August 2010 the National Research Council decadal survey, New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics, selected LSST as the highest priority new ground?based project to be built this decade. [NAS Press Release] July 2012, the National Science Board gave the NSF approval to advance LSST to the final design stage. [NSF Press Release] By digitally imaging the sky for a decade, the LSST will produce a petabyte?scale, non?proprietary database suitable for addressing the most pressing questions in astronomy and physics, while driving advances in big?data science and computing. With its 8.4?meter primary mirror, a field of view 50 times the size of the full moon, and a 3,200?megapixel camera, LSST will relentlessly scan the entire sky visible from its location on a mountain peak in Northern Chile. LSST will take pairs of 15?second exposures in six optical bands across the accessible celestial sphere about twice a week for ten years, building up a digital movie of our dynamic Universe and documenting changes on timescales both short and cosmological. Ten billion galaxies and ten billion stars will be catalogued; alerts will be issued almost instantly for any object that has changed in location or brightness since the last observation. LSST will provide a thousand?fold increase in throughput over current survey facilities, dramatically advancing our knowledge in four main areas of research: Characterizing the properties of dark energy and dark matter; Creating a census of small bodies in the Solar System and searching for potentially hazardous asteroids; Studying transients, e.g., objects such as supernovae that suddenly increase dramatically in brightness; and Mapping the Milky Way Galaxy in order to understand how it formed and evolved. For large projects like LSST, the NSF requires that prior to construction funding, designs, specifications, and work scopes be completed to detail sufficient for bid to industry. Critical components of the LSST system have been engineered, prototyped, and simulated to understand with certainty the costs, procedures, and risks associated with an on?budget, on?time completion of a facility to meet the defined science goals. Five accomplishments funded by this award are described here: The Telescope and Site team has developed designs for the telescope mount, telescope structure, and secondary mirror and its support system to the point that they are ready for seeking commercial bids. Under contract to the LSST project, architects and engineers have designed a sleek structure to house the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) on Cerro Pachón that will reduce wind resistance and image?smearing turbulence, making the building an integral component of the modern observing system. The 90% Summit Facility design package was completed in February 2012. The Data Management team has prototyped pipelines for reducing LSST data and tested those pipelines by reprocessing data from existing surveys, including SDSS Stripe 82. The prototype pipelines have been made available to the community. The Database team has developed an innovative "overlapping partitioning" method for storing LSST’s enormous dataset for rapid access. By overlapping equally sized packets of information in a partitioned sphere, searching for nearest neighbor sources becomes quick and efficient. Further, the technique has been shown to work just as efficiently with increasingly complex systems. 4. The LSST Image Simulator has produced 'end?to?end' image simulations to verify the scientific performance of the complete LSST system design. It inputs realistic catalogs into a database of astronomical sources. Each source is represented by its position, brightness, shape, variability and spectral energy distribution. For a simulated LSST exposure, photons from the astronomical sources are traced through a 12?layer turbulent atmosphere, through the telescope and camera optics and converted into electrons in a simulation of the detector performance (including chip defects, charge diffusion, and saturation effects). The output of the simulated exposure is compared to the known characteristics of sources in the input catalog, providing a check on each LSST component in each photon’s path. 5. To gain experience with delivering alerts to the interested public, LSST has prototyped a free iPhone application called Transient Events, which notifies subscribers of events discovered by the three telescopes of the Catalina Real Time Survey. Comments from a summer 2010 user survey have resulted in improved user interface, updated graphics, additional content for the general public, and optimization for iPad, all developed as part of a student research project in an undergraduate computer science class. Four of the 5 highlights come with an image and caption: www.lsst.org/files/image_gallery/images/site/half/Render3?half.jpg Caption: Sleek, modern LSST Observing Facility No picture for highlight 2 www.lsst.org/News/enews/img/DataMiningSphere.jpg Caption: LSST Data Partitioning Technique www.lsst.org/files/image_gallery/images/data/470/ImSim?2011?470.jpg Caption: LSST Simulated Image www.lsst.org/lsst/sites/default/files/LgAppIcon.png Caption: LSST iPhone App
