Rubin Digest 05 September 2018

5 September 2018

Project & Science News

The LSST 2018 Project and Community Workshop, which took place in Tucson August 13-17, offered opportunities for face-to-face interactions between geographically distributed LSST project team members and members of the LSST science community. Photos of the event are now available in the LSST Gallery; read more about this year’s event here.

LSST was represented at AURA’s booth at the recent International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly Meeting, held in Vienna August 20-31. A photo of the booth is available in the LSST Gallery.

LSST Director Steve Kahn, Project Manager Victor Krabbendam, and Systems Engineering Manager Brian Selvy traveled to Spain during the week of August 20-24. While there, the team visited Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) vendor Asturfeito to discuss the schedule and preparations for Factory Acceptance Testing of the TMA, which will begin in September (click here for a group photo). Prior to the Asturfeito visit, Steve traveled to France where he joined Camera staff meeting with L3 vendor Thales SESO (TSESO) and REOSC to discuss contract status. They also visited IN2P3 to review work completed on the Filter Exchanger, which is progressing well.

The Coating Chamber arrived safely In Antwerp, Belgium on a barge despite low water levels in the rivers and canals of Europe. In mid-September, the Coating Chamber will be placed aboard the aptly named Mv BBC Arizona. Once the ship leaves Antwerp, the voyage to Chile is expected to take 30 to 45 days.

The LSST Science Advisory Committee (SAC) met on August 13 as part of the LSST 2018 Project and Community Workshop. The committee discussed the LSST data rights and data access policies, and developed plans to review the LSST Cadence Optimization White Papers, which are being prepared by the community in advance of the November 30, 2018 deadline. The SAC recommendations can be found at this link.

LSST Corporation News

The LSST Corporation hosted a group of 19 student interns at the LSST 2018 Project and Community Workshop, funding the students’ transportation, registration, and housing. At the workshop, each of the students gave a brief presentation and displayed a poster summarizing their LSST-related summer research under the guidance of LSST Corp’s Enabling Science instructors Prof. Pat Burchat (Stanford) and Prof. Gordon Richards (Drexel). While in Tucson, the students also toured the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona. The LSST Corp is seeking funding to continue bringing students to the annual workshop. A photo of the student group is available in the LSST Gallery.

Personnel News

Siegfried Eggl joined the Data Management subsystem on September 1. He will be working in the Alert Production group at the University of Washington. Siegfried will be spearheading the development of MOPS, the Moving Objects Processing Software, which will use detections made on the differences between LSST images taken at different times to identify and track the orbits of solar system objects.

Penn State is adding new open-rank faculty positions to build on existing excellence in astrophysics, through a cluster hire with a theme of Data Sciences for application to large astronomical surveys such as LSST. More information about these positions can be found here.

Upcoming Meeting with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2018

September 5-6: AMCL Meeting, SLAC, CA

September 17-19: LSST Cadence Hackathon, Flatiron Institute, NY

September 27-28: LSST Corporation Executive Board Retreat, Tucson, AZ*

October 21-26: AAS Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) 50th Annual Meeting, Knoxville, TN

October 22-26: LSST-DESC Autumn Sprint Week, Edinburgh, Scotland*

October 24-25: LSST Corporation Institutional & Executive Board Meeting, Tucson, AZ*

December 17-21: South American Workshop on Cosmology in the LSST Era, Sao Paulo, Brazil

2019

January 6-10: AAS 233rd Meeting, Seattle, WA

May 20-23: LSST@Asia, Sydney, Australia*