Legacy Survey of Space and Time Archives

The Milky Way over Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Credit: Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA/B. Quint.

Sorcha: Optimized Solar System Ephemeris Generation By Rubin Observatory

by Keith CowingJune 11, 2025September 18, 2025

Sorcha is a solar system survey simulator built for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and future large-scale wide-field surveys.

2-dimensional illustrations for the on-sky locations (α, δ) for the first, discovery, and last images of the LSST discoveries with 13 ≤ H ≤ 14 for qs = 2.8 for all years (top row), odd rolling years (middle row) and even rolling years (bottom row). This excludes Year 2 of the simulation, which only deploys a rolling cadence over half of the survey footprint. The white star indicates the Solar Apex and the thin white line indicates the galactic plane. A sample of the observations for 10 ISOs is shown in the last column: the first, discovery, and last observations are connected by straight lines of random colour and the last observation is marked by a white dot to indicate the direction of motion. — astro-ph.EP

Astronomy & Telescopes, Comets and Asteroids, Interstellar, Panspermia, Status Report

The Visibility of the Ōtautahi-Oxford Interstellar Object Population Model in LSST

by Keith CowingFebruary 25, 2025February 25, 2025

With a new probabilistic technique for sampling interstellar object (ISO) orbits with high efficiency, we assess the observability of ISOs under a realistic cadence for the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory’s […]