Argonne’s High Energy Physics division hosted an exploratory workshop on April 11 and 12 to discuss instrumentation options for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) once the initial survey is complete.

The LSST camera, telescope, and software will be commissioned and put into operation in the near future. The baseline plan is a ten-year multiband imagine survey of the southern sky in the ugrizy bands.

At the April event, an international team of scientists including researchers from universities, national laboratories, and observatories, discussed tradeoffs in science performance, cost, and uniqueness for next-generation instrumentation for the LSST system. Options discussed spanned modest changes, such as a different set of filters, to a more challenging replacement of the imaging focal plane with different sensors. The group also explored the possibility of constructing a wide-field multi-object fiber-fed spectrograph as a complement to the LSST imaging survey.

A white paper of the group’s findings and recommendations is expected to be available on the arXiv soon. For more information about LSST, visit: https://​www​.lsst​.org/​lsst/.