The best part of #RubinFirstLook: the exquisite quality, sheer number of frames, and algorithm matching for each asteroid detection. As expected, this is game over for all other "citizen science" projects or amateur observations out there, at least for MBAs: who can beat this?
https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery/collections/first-look-gallery/5iqj02kcs14lt24j845a58n15p
Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
A statement on how the Catalina Sky Survey complements the Vera C. Rubin observatory.
The Rubin / LSST only sees half of the sky, the Southern half, so I think there will be room for others.
Not to mention that occultations are growing in importance, and I'm not sure the Rubin will add anything there.
Making an inventory of the Solar System is one of the four fundamental science requirements for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The current baseline footprint for LSST's main Wide-Fast-Deep (WFD) Survey observes the sky below 0$^\circ$ declination, which includes only half of the ecliptic plane. Critically, key Solar System populations are asymmetrically distributed on the sky: they will be entirely missed, or only partially mapped, if only the WFD occurs. We propose a Northern Ecliptic Spur (NES) mini survey, observing the northern sky up to +10$^\circ$ ecliptic latitude, to maximize Solar System science with LSST. The mini survey comprises a total area of $\sim$5800 deg$^2$/604 fields, with 255 observations/field over the decade, split between g,r, and z bands. Our proposed survey will 1) obtain a census of main-belt comets; 2) probe Neptune's past migration history, by exploring the resonant structure of the Kuiper belt and the Neptune Trojan population; 3) explore the origin of Inner Oort cloud objects and place significant constraints on the existence of a hypothesized planet beyond Neptune; and 4) enable precise predictions of KBO stellar occultations. These high-ranked science goals of the Solar System Science Collaboration are only achievable with this proposed northern survey.
@megschwamb @TMEubanks after these first look results, I finally got to dive in more detail into the estimations/simulations paper from days ago and it's all very clearly explained in section 3, excellent work!
Follow the example of Gennadiy Borisov and look to low solar elongation for comets?
@sharponlooker To be honest that's been true for a decade already. Once Gaia was available and used by big surveys, I no longer trusted any astrometry from amateurs.
But every asteroid discovered by Rubin is a new potential target for amateur occultation observers. Occultations are something that simply requires a lot of small telescopes and people trained to use them, and that's where the amateur community comes in.
Viraptor
V Martín
Marshall Eubanks
Meg Schwamb
Thomas Sturm
Michael Busch
simonbp