Last update : 12th August 2023
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 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.
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
Useful definitions (see the bottom of this page for the description of the data products in this Table 1 from Guy et al.).
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 months after System First Light
Start of LSST Science operations : projected about 4 months after System First Light and after the Science Validation phase has been successfully completed
In the above schedule, DP1 (the first real LSSTCam data products) is DP1, but it will only have a very small subset (a few nights) of the early commissioning data.
DP2 will have full reprocessed data but only data from the Science Validation phase.
DR1 will have the first 6 months of science survey data included and will have completely processed data. It will be released 1 year after the start of the science survey.
Alert generation : the Guy et al. RTN describes how alert generation will be prioritised as templates become available
Table 8 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)
Data release dates and observation coverage
There is a revised full 10 year approximate data release schedule in Marshall et al. RDO-11, which is now aligned with the Guy et al. document.
Details of what will be included in the various data releases
As noted above DP1 and DP2 will be revised such that there will be no on-sky data with ComCam, and the project will move more quickly to LSSTCam on-sky data. The Guy et al. document above outlines what will be in the data releases and here is the Table 1 from Marshall et al. describing what those data products are.
