LSST—Home Synoptic Survey
<p>Mar 1, 2010 6:35 PM  Monday 4:15 Colloq.
 
STEVE Kahn ... soon to be Chm of Physics at STFD ... great talk.  
 
Chas Simonyi  (MSFT Office orig.) gave  20M dol.
Bill Gates gave 10M dollars.   Already  built and stored ? primary.
 
Total cost will be about 455M  +  oper budg of 37M per yr.
USA funded only (largely... DOE and NSF.
Will prob. get top priority or high priority in DECADAL review to be finished in Sept 2010.
Rog Blanford is the head.   Big bang for the buck.
 
faint objects, short exposure.
Each image exposure is 15 seconds.  Has 37 seconds in each position  (nees to move and 
needs to stop.  slews  3.5 degr in 4 seconds.
Massive  300 tons.
 
.2 arc seconds per pixel.
 
SCOPE:   3.2  GIGAPIXEL  !!!!
 
Objects that MOVE.   Will trace billions of remote galaxies.
Explore dark matter and energy.
 
Adaptive optics... motors on all three mirrors.  tertiary blt into the primary.
 
Each CCD is 4k by 4k pixels.  A RAFT is  3 by 3  CCDs of  12.5 by 12.5K pixels.
 
3k electronic channels  to xfer data from CCDS to computer.
will accum  200-300 petabytes in 10 yrs =  (current volume of all data (?) in the world)
publicly available.
 
focal plane will be  64 CM diam
 
CAMERA will be the size of an SUV  300 tons.
 
Catalog of  1 trillion entries of astro objects!
 
?  all objects:  100 visits during 10 years.
 
SIMULATION:  has simulated every photon... total ray trace and
all atmospheric events,  wind,  optics,  lens dynamics.
 
SCIENCE BOOK  (online)
  expected sci Q and A.
 
bottom line a FINDERSCOPE for humanity.
 
first light in 2015 late;  online late 2016.  observe for 10 yrs.
 
detect  PHA  ptoent  hazard asteroids  Pot haz objects.
NEO  near earth objects;  espec  >  140 meters... NASA mandate.
 
KT impactor.
 
get actual postion of every oject in Milky Way  with parallax.
will find ALL short period binaries  (abt 10% of stars).
Celestial cinematogrpahy.
 
will detect  1010 galaxies up to z> 6.
 
Active Galactic Nuclei...  BH s are crucial to galaxy formation  due to their radiation.
AGNs don't move...   can disting with high prob.
LLST will find  10 7 supernovae over 10 yrs.  (now know of only 1000.
 
Entendue is the product of the area and received solid angle of an optical system, AOmega.
 
Quote from the Economist:  
A special report on managing information
WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.</p>