rubinann17008 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 17 March 2017

17 March 2017

Project News

A few key LSST hires became effective recently, in particular Amanda Bauer as the new Head of Education and Public Outreach and Wil O’Mullane as the Project Manager for Data Management.  These are in addition to Brian Selvy’s recent promotion to Systems Engineering Manager.  LSST is proud to attract such outstanding talent to the project and confident of great things to come.

The construction images LSST Site Manager Eduardo Serrano sends weekly from Cerro Pachón are amazing!  This week we see progress on the facilities building, work being done on the 7th and 8th level of the structure, white siding on the lower enclosure, and the stairway inside the pier.

At Asturfeito in Spain, the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) construction continues with a successful trial fit of the Azimuth support on its track.  An Azimuth axial bearing was placed in its position in order to check the interface with support.  Clearances for components assembly were checked and minor adjustments will be made on some parts.  This trial fit proved very useful in preparing for on-site installation in 2018. 

CAID Industries in Tucson is responsible for several main structural components of LSST including the M1M3 weldment (earlier story here).  At this point, CAID has begun final phase of M1M3 Cell machining.  This final phase breaks down the 4400 mirror support system's interface features on the deck plate into multiple machining zones.  This manufacturing technique allows machined features to be precisely located by utilizing a laser tracker and a 3-axis CNC controlled machining head.  In this short video, the DePMaS (Deck Plate Machining System) is mounted directly onto the M1M3 Cell and engraving the LSST logo on a sample piece of material.

In this Facebook post, Object Profile visualized the source code in the LSST Astronomical Framework (afw), one of the core components of LSST Data Management's software. Each colored box is a source code file representing the approximately 250,000 lines of codes written by LSST engineers and scientists. 

Two members of the LSST Science Advisory Committee (SAC) are stepping down after several years of service: Michael Wood-Vasey (U. Pittsburgh) and Marla Geha (Yale University).  We are sorry to see them go, and thank them for their substantial contributions to the SAC deliberations.  New members of the SAC will be announced shortly.

Corporation News

Savannah Jacklin, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University and a member of the LSST Transients & Variables Transiting Planets science collaboration subgroup, recently had a paper accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.  The paper describes LSST exoplanet detection per year of operation and can be found on arXiv here.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2017

March 20 – 23: ASTRO: Time Series Analysis for Synoptic Surveys and Gravitational Wave Astronomy,International Center for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bengaluru, India

April 3 - 5: LSSTC F2F Board Meeting and Hill Visits, Washington, DC

April  6 & 7: AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) Meeting, Washington, DC

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

May 1 – 3: NSF Large Facilities Workshop, Baton Rouge and Livingston, LA

May 1 – 5: AURA Board and Member Representatives Annual Meeting, Tucson, AZ

May 12 - 13: LSST Detection of Optical Counterparts of Gravitational Waves*, BNL.  Contact Morgan May for additional information. 

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

May 31 - June 2: Supernovae:  The LSST Revolution Workshop *, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

June 12 – 16: Getting Ready for Doing Science with LSST Data,* IN2P3, Lyon, France

June 19 – 21: AURA Workforce and Diversity Committee (WDC), Maui, HI

July 10 - 14: DESC Meeting, Dark Energy School, and Hack Day*, BNL

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

September 6 – 8: NSF/DOE Joint Status Review, Tucson, AZ

September 14 – 15: AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) Meeting, Tucson, AZ

November 7 – 9: AURA Workforce & Diversity Committee (WDC), La Serena, Chile