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The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science will support Rubin Observatory in its operations phase to carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. They will also provide support for scientific research with the data. During operations, NSF funding is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF, and DOE funding is managed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC), under contract by DOE. Rubin Observatory is operated by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC.

NSF is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

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Let's Connect

  1. For Scientists
  2. Data products, pipelines, and services
  3. Simulation software

Simulation software

Code packages that are (or have been) used to model the Rubin Observatory from sky to detector and the survey strategy for the LSST.

Survey simulations

rubin_scheduler: Scheduling and simulating millions of observations for the LSST.

rubin_sim: A framework for analyzing LSST survey strategies, and survey progress and outcomes.

These code packages were previously referred to as the Operations Simulator (OpSim) and Metric Analysis Framework (MAF), respectively.

Go to survey strategy simulations technical documentation.

Image simulations

Open-source software tools that are (or have been) used to simulate LSST images.

  • ImSim: A software package to generate simulated images for LSSTCam, created and maintained by the Dark Energy Science Collaboration.
  • PhoSim: Monte Carlo codes that calculate the physics of the atmosphere, and a telescope and camera, and simulate realistic astronomical images (Peterson et al. 2015).
  • CatSim: This software to generate simulated astronomical catalogs has been moved into the rubin_sim package.
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