Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.8617c&link_type=abstract
2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #86.17; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
LSST is a wide-field survey instrument that addresses key scientific priorities, including planetary science objectives, of a number of committees commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences. The baseline LSST design is an 8.4m aperture telescope with a 3.2 giga-pixel focal plane array that will allow detections of point sources as faint as magnitude 24.8 by co-adding back-to-back 15-second images comprising 9.6 square degrees each. By visiting each field twice in a night and revisiting on 3-5 well-spaced nights per lunation, the survey will accumulate a massive catalog of solar system objects. This will include upwards of 70-80% of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140m diameter within 10 years, making a significant contribution towards addressing a recent Congressional directive to NASA to catalog 90% of such objects. LSST will catalog millions of main-belt asteroids and perhaps 20,000 trans-neptunian objects, providing ancillary information about color and photometric variability for many of these. Pluto-like objects will be detectable at heliocentric distances beyond 300 AU. Long-period comets will generally be discovered far earlier than previously possible, enabling photometric studies uncontaminated by nucleus activity and the testing of Oort cloud population models.
Chesley Steven R.
Connolly Andrew J.
Harris Alan W.
Ivezic Zeljko
Kubica Jeremy
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