Abstract
Perhaps the most exciting promise of the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of
Space and Time (LSST) is its capability to discover phenomena never before seen
or predicted from theory: true astrophysical novelties, but the ability of LSST
to make these discoveries will depend on the survey strategy. Evaluating
candidate strategies for true novelties is a challenge both practically and
conceptually: unlike traditional astrophysical tracers like supernovae or
exoplanets, for anomalous objects the template signal is by definition unknown.
We present our approach to solve this problem, by assessing survey completeness
in a phase space defined by object color, flux (and their evolution), and
considering the volume explored by integrating metrics within this space with
the observation depth, survey footprint, and stellar density. With these
metrics, we explore recent simulations of the Rubin LSST observing strategy
across the entire observed footprint and in specific regions in the Local
Volume: the Galactic Plane and Magellanic Clouds. Under our metrics, observing
strategies with greater diversity of exposures and time gaps tend to be more
sensitive to genuinely new phenomena, particularly over time-gap ranges left
relatively unexplored by previous surveys. To assist the community, we have
made all the tools developed publicly available. Extension of the scheme to
include proper motions and the detection of associations or populations of
interest, will be communicated in paper II of this series. This paper was
written with the support of the Vera C. Rubin LSST Transients and Variable
Stars and Stars, Milky Way, Local Volume Science Collaborations.
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