rubinann16042 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 11 November 2016

11 November 2016

Project News

An LSST-commissioned review of the LSST Operations Plan took place last week in Tucson.  The Review Panel was charged to assess the current state of the Plan for its comprehensiveness, appropriateness and adequacy in meeting the operational requirements of the LSST system.  Over 2.5 days, LSST team members presented details of the draft plan to a panel of 15 reviewers with diverse experience in the management and operations of astronomical facilities, high energy physics experiments, and major data centers.  The review resulted in a set of insightful and productive recommendations for the team to consider as they complete this stage of the LSST Operations Plan development.  This careful planning is in preparation for a proposal to be submitted to the NSF and DOE in 2017.

Bill Gressler, our Project Manager for Telescope & Site, was in Chile last week and returned with a full report of activity on the summit and at the base facility.  Much of this activity can be seen on our summit webcams.  All the forms for concrete on the lower enclosure have now been installed, dome plates are being installed atop the forms in preparation for concrete pouring in mid-November, and more building steel has been attached.  On calibration hill, concrete has been poured to support the auxiliary telescope.  Main power has been connected to the LSST transformer meaning we now have grid power to use on site. Installation of fiber optics lines continues.  At the base facility, preparation for construction commenced with the removal of shrubs and trees to accommodate parking and logistics. 

LSST Systems Engineers George Angeli, Kathryn Wesson, Gregory Dubois-Felsmann, and Brian Selvy met in Pasadena, CA, last week with other major astronomy projects and software vendors (NoMagic, Intercax) to explore the use of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) tools.  Read more …

Corporation News

The Large Scale Structure Science Collaboration has dissolved and been incorporated into the Dark Energy Science Collaboration group. There are currently eight active Science Collaborations: Galaxies; Stars, Milky Way, and Local Volume; Solar System; Dark Energy; Active Galactic Nuclei, Transient/Variable Stars; Strong Lensing; and Informatics and Statistics.

Personnel News

LSST welcomes Jon Kmak to the Telescope & Site group as an Electrical Technician.  Jon has formal training as aircraft technician with approximately 4 years of experience and license to taxi airplanes for testing purposes. He is working on the detailing, construction, assembly and documentation of several elements of the control system, primarily supporting the M1M3 mirror cell system effort

Augustin Guyonnet has joined the Data Management (DM) subsystem as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University.  Augustin will work with the DM group at Princeton on the development of the tools (hardware, analysis software, and modeling) needed to determine the optical transmission of the atmosphere at wavelengths that are relevant to LSST observations.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2016

November 7-11: LSST DESC Hack Week *, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

November 14 - 15: LSST Refrigeration Preliminary Design Review, SLAC

November 16-18: Preparing for Supernova Science in the LSST Era: A Kick-Off Workshop *University of Pittsburgh, PA

November 29: Coating Plant Preliminary Design Review, Dresden, Germany

December 1-2: Precision Astronomy with Fully Depleted CCDs*, BNL

December 12 - 13: Towards Science in Chile with the LSST 2016 *Viña del Mar, Chile

December 13 - 14: AURA Workforce and Diversity Committee (WDC), Tucson, AZ

2017

January 3: ZTF Community Workshop at AAS 229*, Grapevine, TX

January 3: LSST AGN Science Collaboration Roadmap Development Meeting* AAS 229 Meeting; Grapevine, TX

January 3 - 7: AAS 229, Grapevine, TX.  LSST’s Open House is 7:30 – 9:00p, on Wednesday, January 4th.

Spring 2017: Blind Analysis in High-Stakes Survey Science: When, Why, and How? *SLAC; Menlo Park, CA

January 24 - 26: Commissioning Review, SLAC National Accelerator Lab

February 2 – 3: AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) Meeting, Tucson, AZ

February 13: Enabling Dark Energy Science with the LSST Through Interactive Dark Energy Schools and Hack Days * SLAC; Menlo Park, CA

March 6-8: LSST Joint Technical Meeting, IPAC, Pasadena, CA

April 3-7: LSST DESC Hack Week *, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

May 22 – 25: Infrastructure for Time Domain Science in the Era of LSST, Tucson, AZ

May 31-June 2: Supernovae Workshop *, Northwestern University, IL

June 12 – 16: Getting Ready for Doing Science with LSST Data, Lyon, France

July 10-14: DESC Meeting, Dark Energy School, and Hack Day*, Brookhaven National Lab

August 14 – 18: LSST 2017 Project & Community Workshop, Tucson, AZ