Last update : 12th August 202327th February 2024
There are two documents relevant to data previews and releases :
Rubin Observatory Plans for an Early Science Program (Leanne Guy et al. RTN-11), latest version is dated 4th 31st October 2023.
“Release Scenarios for Rubin - LSST Commissioning and Survey Data” (Phil Marshall et al. RDO-11) latest version is dated 10th February 2023. On 23rd November 2022, the project released an important update on the Construction Plan. On-sky data with ComCam will NOT be taken. It is anticipated that LSSTCam will now be ready to take on-sky data at the time when ComCam was due to do so (originally end of 2023, but likely now to be July 2024). The DP1 and DP2 plans have changed.This is generally good news as on-sky commissioning with ComCam will be replaced with on-sky commissioning with LSSTCam Note this is now out of date and has not been updated to reflect the new schedule. For now, focus on Guy et al. RTN-11 document. Likely a new version of RDO-11 will be synchronised with RTN-11 and released in the next few months.
Significant changes have been made to the LSST start schedule during October 2023. Due to a delay of several months in the delivery of LSSTCam to Chile (due to a vacuum leak), and a failure of the summit dome crane, it is now likely that some on-sky observations and commissioning tasks will now happen with ComCam. This is a change since the last official version of the commissioning plan and path to first light was summarised on this page.
From Guy et al. RTN-11 :
“The updated plan calls for on-sky data to be taken with ComCam for approximately two months, around July-August 2024 to support Telescope commissioning, primarily the Active Optics System. This is approximately four months earlier than could be done with LSSTCam.”
System first light (with LSSTCam and full mirror assembly) is April 2025. There is a large uncertainty in the start of the science survey of 4-7 months from this point. Almost certainly it will be no earlier than August 2025 (which is currently the earliest date for operational readiness review).
Operations schedule : https://www.lsst.org/about/project-status
In short, the above link to the Monthly Updates indicates completion of Operational Readiness Review and start of Science survey : No earlier than February 2025.
Guy et al. RTN-11 : summary
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System First Light : a milestone that marks the end of the on-sky engineering phase
System optimisation and Science Validation phase : period of about 4-10 months after System First Light
Start of LSST Science operations : projected about 4-10 months after System First Light and after the Science Validation phase has been successfully completed
In the above schedule, DP1 (the first real LSSTCam or ComCam data products) is DP1, but it will only have a very small subset (a few nights) of the early commissioning data from either ComCam or LSSTCam.
DP2 will have full reprocessed data but only data from the Science Validation phase.
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Alert generation : the Guy et al. RTN describes how alert generation will be prioritised as templates become available
Table 8 3 from Guy et al. summarises the timeline (the solid lines are the beginning of US Financial years, beginning September. The dotted lines are calendar years)
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RTN-11
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Data release dates and observation coverage
There is a revised the full 10 year approximate data release schedule in Marshall et al. RDO-11, which is now aligned with the Guy et al. documentdated 10th February 2023. However it is now out of date due to the delay in the start of the LSST survey operations. This Table has LSST survey starting January 2026. If you add 6-10 months to the dates below, it will roughly align with the new plan.
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Details of what will be included in the various data releases
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