Home

LSST

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is an astronomical facility in Chile designed to perform a decade-long, wide-field survey of the visible sky. The project intends to image the entire accessible sky every few nights, creating a time-domain map of the universe.

The telescope features an 8.4-meter primary mirror and a 3.4-meter secondary in a three-mirror anastigmat design,

Operations and data: The observatory is hosted on Cerro Pachón in Chile, with an operations center in

Scientific goals: The LSST aims to advance studies of dark matter and dark energy through weak gravitational

Names and governance: The project, originally known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, was renamed to Vera

enabling
a
large
field
of
view
of
about
3.5
degrees.
It
is
paired
with
a
single,
extremely
large
digital
camera—about
3.2
gigapixels—mounted
at
the
telescope’s
focal
plane,
which
will
capture
images
in
six
optical
bands
(u,
g,
r,
i,
z,
y).
The
camera
is
one
of
the
largest
ever
built
for
astronomy.
the
United
States.
The
Legacy
Survey
of
Space
and
Time
will
produce
hundreds
of
terabytes
of
data
per
night,
delivering
real-time
alerts
for
transient
events
within
about
60
seconds
and
periodic
data
releases
with
processed
images
and
object
catalogs.
lensing
and
galaxy
clustering,
map
the
structure
of
the
Milky
Way,
study
the
transient
and
variable
universe,
catalog
Solar
System
objects
including
near-Earth
asteroids,
and
support
a
broad
range
of
cosmological
and
astrophysical
investigations.
C.
Rubin
Observatory
to
honor
astronomer
Vera
Rubin.
It
is
funded
by
the
U.S.
National
Science
Foundation
and
international
partners,
and
overseen
by
the
Rubin
Observatory
in
partnership
with
the
Association
of
Universities
for
Research
in
Astronomy.