rubinann17012 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 24 May 2017

24 May 2017

Project News

Mark your calendars for the LSST 2017 Project and Community Workshop, which will take place the week of August 14th in Tucson, AZ. The workshop agenda will include Project topics, suggestions from the Community, and unstructured time for you to set up your own meetings. Registration will open by next week. We look forward to seeing you at #LSST2017!

Highlights of footage taken by the multimedia team that visited Cerro Pachón in March have been edited into a short video that shows the current status of construction at the telescope site. The video was distributed widely throughout the project, posted on LSST’s public website, and posted to social media.

Two major winter storms swept through Cerro Pachón last week, leaving behind some road damage, more than 20 inches (51 cm) of snow, and a (manageable) impact on the construction schedule.  More information and pictures here.

The Project Science Team held a face-to-face meeting in Seattle, May 8-9, 2017. Discussion centered on the progress of all subsystems, with special attention given to updated Data Management construction plans.  At this meeting:

• Colin Slater, a member of the Data Management Subsystem Science Team, presented a study of the impact of heterogeneous sensor array on image differencing performance. The study concluded that all effects can be mitigated with processing algorithms.
• Eric Bellm, the Science Lead for Level 1 science pipelines, described the upcoming Zwicky Transient Facility and how it will be used to test the LSST Alert Distribution pipeline.

Lead Systems Engineer Brian Selvy, Systems Scientist Chuck Claver, and Telescope & Site Technical Manager Shawn Callahan traveled to Spain during the first week of May to review test and verification procedures for the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA). They also went over functional tests of the cable wrap assembly and the primary/tertiary mirror (M1M3) cover. The TMA is scheduled to undergo final pre-shipment testing in September, after which it will be disassembled and shipped to Chile.

The crew at Harris in Rochester, NY is making great progress on closed-loop control of the 3.5 meter secondary mirror (M2) Assembly. The full-size M2 surrogate mirror was placed in the M2 turnover cart for rotation testing earlier this month, with the crew working to test and optimize the mirror support system to ensure it will protect the real glass mirror. LSST’s M2 is currently the largest secondary mirror system in the world, as well as Harris’ largest manufactured optic to date.

Corporation News

The third session of the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program (DSFP) concluded successfully on April 28th in Tucson. This blog post describes the program in detail. The LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program is also pleased to announce its second cohort of Fellows, listed here. This second student cohort will join current DSFP Fellows to participate in the upcoming fall session, to be held at University of Washington the week of September 18th.  

The LSST Solar System Science Collaboration (SSSC) is pleased to announce that Meg Schwamb has been elected as co-chair, replacing Lynne Jones. Meg is currently an assistant scientist at the Gemini Observatory’s Northern Operations Center in Hilo, HI. Find out more about her background and research interests here.

Personnel

Scott Harden was recently hired as Database Administrator in the Data Management subsystem. Scott will be based at NCSA at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and will be responsible for designing, integrating, and administering the databases used by LSST project services hosted at NCSA.

LSST welcomes Michael Logue as the Principal Surveyor to develop an overall logistics plan and strategy to provide safe delivery to Cerro Pachón of all LSST components by land, sea, and air. He will develop specific plans to manage the delivery of systems from our vendors in Spain, Germany, United States and other global locations to arrive in Chile in a timely fashion.

The position of Senior Cloud Solutions Architect in Education and Public Outreach has been added to the LSST Hiring Site since the last Digest. Please spread the word!

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2017

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*, jointly hosted by Stony Brook University & BNL

July 25-27: NSF/DOE Joint Status Review of Data Management, NCSA, IL

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

October 22-26: Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) Conference, Santiago, Chile

October 26-28: Society of Women Engineers WE17 Conference, Austin, TX

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