Speakers
Description
The Rubin Observatory is a new U.S. NSF/DOE-funded facility on Cerro Pachón, Chile, housing the 8.4m Simonyi Survey Telescope. The Observatory is in the final stage of construction, expected to achieve first light and enter commissioning in September 2023. Over a ten-year period 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 cadence covering the sky every 3-4 days to single-exposure depths of r~24mag, the LSST will deliver the largest catalog of Solar System objects to date. Based on simulations, the catalog will include 5M+ new main-belt asteroids, 100,000+ NEAs, 200,000+ Jupiter Trojans, 40,000+ TNOs, and tens of ISOs (among others).
A number of these objects will be very nearby. Existing simulations (using the S3M model and thus very incomplete at small sizes) show Rubin will detect hundreds of objects within a ~lunar distance. Simplistic but informative extrapolations based on comparisons with present-day survey indicate Rubin is likely to discover a number of imminent impactors as well: on order of one per year or more.
This talk will open with a brief status summary and projections for Rubin's Solar System science yields, and then discuss possibilities for imminent impactors. Two most interesting applications are detection of small objects days before impact, but also the ability to rapidly provide precovery observations for objects discovered by other observatories. With operations less than two years away, it's an excellent time to understand how Rubin can contribute to imminent impactor detection and alerting.
