Being Ready at First Light: 10yr Simulations of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)

The Rubin Observatory is an NSF/DOE-funded observatory with an 8m-class telescope, presently under construction on Cerro Pachón, Chile. Over a ten-year period starting in October 2023, Rubin will execute the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Enabled by its 9.6 square degree field of view, a 3.2 Gigapixel camera and a rapid observational cadence covering the sky every 3-4 days to single-exposure depths of r=24.5mag, the LSST will be the largest catalog of Solar System objects to date. In this talk, we will present the first comprehensive, 10-yr, simulations of LSST data products for small body science. These include catalogs of detections (following the LSST data products schema), catalogs of derived object properties, tables of extended information, and the orbit catalogs. The simulated products are useful for testing the viability of science use cases, as well as preparing analysis software to be ready as soon as the LSST survey begins. They have been made available to the Rubin community in a Postgresql database, accessible through the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration’s science platform at http://sssc.dirac.institute.