rubinann16010 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 18 March 2016

18 March 2016

Project News

S. Jacoby traveled to La Serena, Chile last week to participate in the second annual Chile-US Astronomy Education Outreach Summit with more than 60 other representatives of astronomical and educational organizations and facilities in Chile.  The Summit involved administrators, formal and informal educators from Chile and the US, university scientists, funding agencies, the US Embassy in Chile, regional government leaders, and representatives from the professional scientific observatories as well as the smaller community observatories and the astrotourism industry in Chile.  Products of the summit include the construction of a network of astronomy educators, and a “roadmap document” to help guide and promote future collaboration and coordinated of astronomy EPO activities in Chile, and between its international partners. A final draft is expected sometime in May of 2016.

J. Becla, interim Project Manager for Data Management (DM), reports that members of the DM team traveled to NCSA last week for a productive session on data processing system construction planning. 

Members of the Telescope & Site team are in Chile this week, meeting with the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) prime contractor Empresarios Agrupados and summit construction contractor Besalco Construcciones.  The work includes preparing a plan to integrate the TMA into the LSST facilities building, and finding space around the main telescope in which to safely maneuver the multiple pieces of steel. 

CAID Industries in Tucson has completed the floor of the M1M3 mirror cell and is ready to install the hardpoints, which will provide additional support for placing the mirror in the cell.

Personnel Notes

This week LSST welcomes several new people to the project team:

• Project Science Analyst Melissa Graham has joined Zeljko Ivezic’s group at UW where she will support Data Management (DM) activities from a science perspective.  This includes leading studies of DM plans and deliverables, providing feedback to the pipeline design, and producing user-facing papers describing the DM data products for the broader astronomical community.
• Pim Schellart has joined Jon Swinbank’s group at Princeton as a scientific software developer.  Pim’s duties will include development of the low-level, high-performance primitives used to construct the DM software stack.
• Brian Johnson has joined the Telescope & Site group on a temporary basis, using his engineering experience with manufacturing, inspection and design of military ordnance to support engineering documentation of the M1M3 mirror cell & support system effort.
• Cindy Wang has joined the Data Management group as application developer in Xiuqin Wu’s Science User Interface group at IPAC.

As a reminder for the project team, note that today is Laurie Thomas’s last day as our Travel Coordinator.  Travelers should start to use their subsystem administrative assistant for their travel needs until Laurie’s replacement is onboard.  Thank you Laurie for your excellent service to the LSST Project.

Upcoming 2016 Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

March 21: LSSTC Part 1 and Part 2 Proposals due*

March 23-24: I&T Camera Review, SLAC

March 24-25: LSST Transients Working Group Workshop*, Argonne National Laboratory

April 5-7: LSST Photo-Z Workshop*, University of Pittsburgh

April 11-13: LSSTC Board Meeting* in Washington, DC

April 25 – 29: Future Sky Surveys and Big Data Workshop, Daejoen, Korea

May 16 - 19: Data Management Leadership Team Meeting, Tucson, AZ

May 22 – 25: Cross-correlation Spectacular with LSST:  Exploring Synergies Between LSST and External Datasets to Discover Fundamental Physics*, BNL

May 24-26: XLDB 2016 Conference, SLAC

June  6-10: Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy VI*, Carnegie Mellon University

June 12-16: Meeting of the Stars, Milky Way and Local Volume Science Collaboration* at AAS 228, San Diego, CA

June 20-24: LSST@Europe2*, Belgrade, Serbia

June 28-July: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation, Edinburgh, Scotland

July 18-22: LSST DESC meeting*, at Oxford, UK

August 15-19: LSST 2016 Project & Science Workshop, Tucson, AZ