The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project is a public-private partnership now half way through the 8- year construction period. LSST construction was initiated in 2014 by the US National Science Foundation to build the observing system within a $473M budget and in time to start the survey in October 2022. The US Department of Energy also participates by funding the camera fabrication with a budget of $168M. LSST will construct the system to conduct a wide fast deep survey of the entire visible sky and to process and serve the data to the US, Chilean, and international contributors without any proprietary period. The designs have matured around the 3-mirror wide field optical system; an 8.4 meter primary, 3.4 meter secondary, and 5 meter tertiary mirror that feed three refractive elements and a 64 cm 3.2 gigapixel focal plane camera. The data management system will reduce, transport, alert, archive roughly 15 terabytes of data produced nightly, and will serve raw and catalog data on daily and annual timescales throughout the 10-year survey. Additional access portals and tools will extend the scientific reach to education and public outreach efforts for students and non-professionals. LSST has completed key elements of the system with hardware being sent to the observing site on Cerro Pachón, Chile, factory integration efforts underway, and the focal plane assembly process started. Software development continues as an open-source project and completed demonstrations of key algorithm performance on existing data sets. LSST continues to plan an on-time and on-budget completion.
|