LSST Data Preview and release schedule

Last update : 27th 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 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. Note this is now out of date and has not been updated to reflect the new schedule.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

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 4-10 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 small subset of the early commissioning data from either ComCam or LSSTCam.

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 3 from Guy et al. RTN-11

Data release dates and observation coverage

There is a the full 10 year approximate data release schedule in Marshall et al. RDO-11, dated 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.

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.