Abstract

Invited Talk - Splinter MinorBodies

Tuesday, 10 September 2024, 14:00   (S21)

The LSST and the Solar System

Meg Schwamb
Queen's University Belfast

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is currently under construction in Chile. This international facility will radically transform our view of the changing night sky. Rubin Observatory will contain an 8.4-m telescope equipped with the world’s largest optical imager, a 3.2-gigapixel camera capable of capturing a 10 square degree patch of the night sky (~40 times the size of the full Moon) in a single exposure. Starting in about the end of 2025 or early 2026, the Rubin Observatory will carry out the widest and deepest optical survey to date, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), scanning the entire visible sky approximately once every three nights for ten years. In addition to discovering millions of various types of explosive transients per night, the LSST will provide an unprecedented dataset to explore the Solar System’s small body inventory. LSST will enable the discovery and monitoring of over 5 million Main Belt asteroids, almost 300,000 Jupiter Trojans, over 100,000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs), more than 40,000 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), tens of interstellar objects, and thousands of comets. Many of these objects will receive hundreds of observations in multiple bandpasses. In this talk, I will present the unique Solar System science opportunities that will be available in the LSST era. I will also provide updates on current and future activities within the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration and highlight avenues for future synergies within the planetary and astronomical communities focusing in particular on opportunities for Europe-based researchers.