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Abstract The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to start the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in early to mid-2025. This multiband wide-field synoptic survey will transform our view of the solar system, with the discovery and monitoring of over five million small bodies. The final survey strategy chosen for LSST has direct implications on the discoverability and characterization of solar system minor planets and passing interstellar objects. Creating an inventory of the solar system is one of the four main LSST science drivers. The LSST observing cadence is a complex optimization problem that must balance the priorities and needs of all the key LSST science areas. To design the best LSST survey strategy, a series of operation simulations using the Rubin Observatory scheduler have been generated to explore the various options for tuning observing parameters and prioritizations. We explore the impact of the various simulated LSST observing strategies on studying the solar system’s small body reservoirs. We examine what are the best observing scenarios and review what are the important considerations for maximizing LSST solar system science. In general, most of the LSST cadence simulations produce ±5% or less variations in our chosen key metrics, but a subset of the simulations significantly hinder science returns with much larger losses in the discovery and light-curve metrics. 

Precise radial velocity (PRV) surveys are important for the search for Earth analogs around nearby bright stars, which induce a small stellar reflex motion with an RV amplitude of ∼10 cm s⁻¹. Detecting such a small RV signal poses challenges to instrumentation, data analysis, and the precision of astrophysical models to mitigate stellar jitter. In this work, we investigate an important component in the PRV error budget—the spectral contamination from the Earth’s atmosphere (tellurics). We characterize the effects of telluric absorption on the RV precision and quantify its contribution to the RV error budget over time and across a wavelength range of 350 nm–2.5μm. We use simulated solar spectra with telluric contamination injected, and we extract the RVs using two commonly adopted algorithms: dividing out a telluric model before performing cross-correlation or forward modeling the observed spectrum incorporating a telluric model. We assume various degrees of cleanness in removing the tellurics. We conclude that the RV errors caused by telluric absorption can be suppressed to close to or even below 1–10 cm s⁻¹in the blue optical region. At red through near-infrared wavelengths, however, the residuals of tellurics can induce an RV error on the meter-per-second level even under the most favorable assumptions for telluric removal, leading to significant systematic noise in the RV time series and periodograms. If the red-optical or near-infrared becomes critical in the mitigation of stellar activity, systematic errors from tellurics can be eliminated with a space mission such as EarthFinder.