Optimizing the LSST Observing Strategy for Dark Energy Science: DESC Recommendations for the Deep Drilling Fields and other Special Programs

Understand

We review the measurements of dark energy enabled by observations of the Deep Drilling Fields and the optimization of survey design for cosmological measurements.

• This white paper is the result of efforts by the LSST DESC Observing Strategy Task Force (OSTF), which represents the entire collaboration, and aims to make recommendations on observing strategy for the DDFs that will benefit all cosmological analyses with LSST.
• It is accompanied by the DESC-WFD white paper (Lochner et al.).
• We argue for altering the nominal deep drilling plan to have $>6$ month seasons, interweaving $gri$ and $zy$ observations every 3 days with 2, 4, 8, 25, 4 visits in $grizy$, respectively.