rubinann18004 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 27 February 2018

27 February 2018

Project & Science News

An Education and Public Outreach (EPO) focus group for teachers was held in Tucson on February 3-4. Led by LSST Education Specialist Ardis Herrold, the event gathered 11 high school and college educators from across the U.S. to solicit feedback on prototypes of the online educator tools, including Jupyter Notebook-based interactive astronomy investigations, currently being developed by the EPO team. Read more about the meeting in this recent news post.

The Project Office kicked off a series of spring LSST subsystem meetings on February 12 in Tucson, AZ. Subsystem managers, administrators, and other project office staff members joined LSST’s Senior Management team for a day of project updates and discussion. A group photo of the event is available in the LSST Gallery. The next subsystem meeting will be held by Telescope and Site, on February 28-March 2 in Tucson.

The first column of the LSST Summit Facility Dome was lifted into place on February 13. See photos of this exciting development here, and follow the ongoing progress of the Dome installation on the Summit Webcam, at the bottom of the LSST Gallery home page.

A team of LSST personnel recently returned from a trip to subcontractor Asturfeito, in Spain, to review the factory test plans and procedures that will be used to verify the performance requirements of the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA). Photos from the TMA site visit are available in the LSST Gallery. During the next six weeks, subcontractors from all over Europe will meet in the Asturfeito factory to install the support equipment necessary to move the telescope under computer control. Those attending will include specialists in motors, encoders, chillers, cable management systems, and servo control.

The LSST Solar System Science Collaboration has launched a blog. Its inaugural post was written by  Matthew Knight, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, and is titled, “Why I’m excited for what LSST will do for comet science.”  

Did you know you can order clothing items featuring the LSST logo at Land’s End? Use this link to browse options and place your order.

Personnel News

Sergio Vega Cabrera joined the Project as a Safety Coordinator on February 12. Sergio will be based in Chile and will be a valuable addition to the Chilean safety team. As LSST construction activity continues to increase, Sergio will help provide the additional safety oversight that is needed for work at the summit, hotel construction, and the base facility.

Austin Roberts joined the Systems Engineering subsystem on February 19 as Senior Systems Engineer. Austin will be responsible for a range of duties including maintenance and advancement of the project’s MagicDraw SysML model, support of subsystem and component test and acceptance reviews, and development of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). He will also be assisting in the development, customization and use of tools necessary to perform systems engineering tasks.

Gabriele Cormoretto joined the DM subsystem on February 19 as the Configuration/Release Engineer in the LSST Data Management System Architecture group, attending to release management and requirements verification.

Upcoming Meeting with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2018

February 28-March 2: LSST Telescope & Site Subsystem Meeting, Tucson, AZ

March 5-9: LSST Systems Engineering/Data Management Joint Subsystem Meeting, Pasadena, CA

April 11-13: LSST Education & Public Outreach Subsystem Meeting, Tucson, AZ

April 16-18: LSSTC Congressional visits, Washington DC

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

April 19-20: AMCL Meeting, Washington DC

May 21-22: DECam Community Science Workshop 2018, Tucson AZ

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

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

June 19-21: Data Visualization and Exploration in the LSST Era, University of IL/NCSA, Champaign, IL*

August 13-17: LSST Project and Community Workshop 2018, Tucson, AZ