  The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be a ground-based, optical,
all-sky, rapid cadence survey project with tremendous potential for discovering
and characterizing asteroids. With LSST's large 6.5m diameter primary mirror, a
wide 9.6 square degree field of view 3.2 Gigapixel camera, and rapid
observational cadence, LSST will discover more than 5 million asteroids over
its ten year survey lifetime. With a single visit limiting magnitude of 24.5 in
r-band, LSST will be able to detect asteroids in the Main Belt down to
sub-kilometer sizes. The current strawman for the LSST survey strategy is to
obtain two visits (each visit being a pair of back-to-back 15s exposures) per
field, separated by about 30 minutes, covering the entire visible sky every 3-4
days throughout the observing season, for ten years.
  The catalogs generated by LSST will increase the known number of small bodies
in the Solar System by a factor of 10-100 times, among all populations. The
median number of observations for Main Belt asteroids will be on the order of
200-300, with Near Earth Objects receiving a median of 90 observations. These
observations will be spread among ugrizy bandpasses, providing photometric
colors and allowing sparse lightcurve inversion to determine rotation periods,
spin axes, and shape information.
  These catalogs will be created using automated detection software, the LSST
Moving Object Processing System (MOPS), that will take advantage of the
carefully characterized LSST optical system, cosmetically clean camera, and
recent improvements in difference imaging. Tests with the prototype MOPS
software indicate that linking detections (and thus discovery) will be possible
at LSST depths with our working model for the survey strategy, but evaluation
of MOPS and improvements in the survey strategy will continue. All data
products and software created by LSST will be publicly available.
