Cosmology Seminar- Debiasing the Solar System with LSST

The upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will deliver larger catalogs of solar system object orbits, sizes, colors, and light curves than any survey to date. However, all surveys are subject to observational and algorithmic bias, skewing their catalogs' distributions away from the intrinsic. To prepare to characterize LSST's survey biases, we develop methods and tools to quantify the selection function of a wide-field solar system survey as a function of all six orbital parameters and absolute magnitude. We apply these methods to debias a novel HelioLinC3D search for Centaurs in the Pan-STARRS1 detection catalog, confirming a literature Centaur model's marginal distributions, rejecting its joint distribution, and estimating an intrinsic population of 21,400 Centaurs with Hr < 13.7. We use Sorcha, a new solar system survey simulator, to simulate the ten-year LSST detection catalog of a full-scale solar system, including cutting-edge population models of near-Earth objects, main belt asteroids, Jupiter Trojan, and trans-Neptunian objects. This catalog offers the best predictions of the LSST solar system yield and is made publicly available, allowing researchers to test new methods, algorithms, and software on LSST-like data before the survey is conducted. Future work includes applying these methods to LSST.