Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) is a young organization
dedicated to time-domain observations at optical and (potentially) near-IR
wavelengths. To this end, LCOGT is constructing a world-wide network of
telescopes, including the two 2m Faulkes telescopes, as many as 17 x 1m
telescopes, and as many as 23 x 40cm telescopes. These telescopes initially
will be outfitted for imaging and (excepting the 40cm telescopes) spectroscopy
at wavelengths between the atmospheric UV cutoff and the roughly 1-micron limit
of silicon detectors. Since the first of LCOGT's 1m telescopes are now being
deployed, we lay out here LCOGT's scientific goals and the requirements that
these goals place on network architecture and performance, we summarize the
network's present and projected level of development, and we describe our
expected schedule for completing it. In the bulk of the paper, we describe in
detail the technical approaches that we have adopted to attain the desired
performance. In particular, we discuss our choices for the number and location
of network sites, for the number and sizes of telescopes, for the
specifications of the first generation of instruments, for the software that
will schedule and control the network's telescopes and reduce and archive its
data, and for the structure of the scientific and educational programs for
which the network will provide observations.Comment: 59 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. AAS Latex v5.2. Accepted for
publication in Pub. Astr. Soc. Pacifi
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