rubinann17022 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 10 October 2017

10 October 2017

Project & Science News

The dates and location for the 2018 LSST Project and Community Workshop have been selected; the event will be held at the Hilton El Conquistador in Tucson, AZ on August 13-17, 2018.

The Education and Public Outreach (EPO) team recently completed a successful review, which was held in Tucson on September 26-28. EPO has made substantial progress in the last year, and recommendations from this review will be used to guide further development of the EPO program’s infrastructure. Read more about the review, and EPO’s exciting plans to engage the public with LSST data, in this blog post.

Congratulations to Vincent Riot (LLNL), who has been appointed the permanent Project Manager for the LSST Camera. Vincent has held this position on an interim basis for just over a year, effectively managing challenges in order to keep the camera project on track.

Members of the Telescope & Site team visited Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) subcontractor Asturfeito in September, where full-scale integration of the elevation structure onto the azimuth assembly is in progress. Click here for a video of the central section of the elevation structure being mounted on top of the elevation trunnions. Current and near-term scheduled work on the TMA includes verification of component fit and function, continued installation of the top end of the telescope, and installation of the electrical and fluid systems. This work is all ramping up to support factory testing near the end of this year.

The LSST Science Advisory Committee (SAC) met via telecom on September 25. At the meeting, Data Management System Science Team Coordinator Mario Juric gave a presentation about the LSST Science Platform: the set of interconnected tools and portals by which the science community will access the LSST data. Mario’s presentation, and a summary of the SAC findings and recommendations, can be found on the SAC web page.

After three weeks of bead blasting and painting, the Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) cell has been completed by subcontractor CAID in Tucson, and the cell has been moved out of the painting bay and into the area at CAID where cell assembly integration activities are scheduled to begin in mid-October. Click here to see a photo of the painted cell.

Personnel News

John Bagnasco joined the Telescope & Site (T&S) team on October 2 as the Control Account Manager (CAM) for the Secondary Mirror (M2) system. He will be responsible for overseeing final acceptance and delivery of the system in New York and to the Assembly, Integration, and Verification (AIV) team in Chile. John comes to LSST most recently from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, CA, where he worked as a research scientist on optical technologies. He also worked briefly on the GMT project in support of their secondary mirror system development.

Christopher Heller joined the Data Management subsystem as Senior Storage Engineer, based at NCSA, on September 25. Christopher will work with the hardware, software, monitoring and incident response environments for the LSST project. He will manage the General Parallel File System (GPFS) infrastructure at NCSA and put together an implementation plan for storage in Chile.

LSST’s Education and Public Outreach (EPO) team is looking for a talented Web Developer to help bring LSST data to the world through the EPO Portal. More information on this position, and other jobs currently available with LSST, can be found here.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2017

October 11-13: Search for Dwarf Companions of the Milky Way and Beyond in the LSST Era, Tucson, AZ*

October 12-13: LSST Corporation Board Meeting & Executive Retreat, Tucson, AZ

October 19, 4:30-6:30 pm: LSST and the Solar System Workshop at the 49th American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting, Provo, UT

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

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

October 27-29: International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) meeting, Santiago, Chile

November 1-3: Data Management Leadership Team face-to-face meeting, Tucson

November 7-9: LSST Safety Council Review, La Serena, Chile

Nov 30 - Dec 1: AURA Workforce & Diversity Committee (WDC), Baltimore, MD

December 4-8: LSST/DESC 2017 Fall/Winter Sprint Week,  Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL*

December 5-7: Dual Agency Review of the LSST Operations Proposal, Tucson, AZ

December 18-19: Project Science Team Meeting, Tucson, AZ

2018

January 8-12: American Astronomical Society (AAS) 231st Meeting, National Harbor, MD

January 10: LSST Town Hall at AAS 231, 7:30 pm

February 5: Dark Energy School, SLAC, CA*

February 5-9: LSST-DESC Collaboration Meeting, SLAC, Menlo Park, CA*

June 10-15: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation Meeting, Austin, TX

April 18-20: Statistical Challenges for Large-scale Structure in the Era of LSST, Oxford, UK*

June 11-15: LSST@Europe3, Lyon, France