The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Preliminary Design Overview

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project is a public-private partnership that is well into the design and development of the complete observatory system to conduct a wide fast deep survey and to process and serve the data. The telescope has a 3-mirror wide field optical system with an 8.4 meter primary, 3.4 meter secondary, and 5 meter tertiary mirror. The reflective optics feed three refractive elements and a 64 cm 3.2 gigapixel camera. The LSST data management system will reduce, transport, alert and archive the roughly 15 terabytes of data produced nightly, and will serve the raw and catalog data accumulating at an average of 7 petabytes per year to the community without any proprietary period. The project has completed several data challenges designed to prototype and test the data management system to significant pre-construction levels. The project continues to attract institutional partners and has acquired non-federal funding sufficient to construct the primary mirror, already in progress at the University of Arizona, build the secondary mirror substrate, completed by Corning, and fund detector prototype efforts, several that have been tested on the sky. A focus of the project is systems engineering, risk reduction through prototyping and major efforts in image simulation and operation simulations. The project has submitted a proposal for construction to the National Science Foundation Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) program and has prepared project advocacy papers for the National Research Council's Astronomy 2010 Decadal Survey. The project is preparing for a 2012 construction funding authorization.