Rubin Digest 10 October 2018

10 October 2018

Project & Science News

A group from the National Science Foundation (NSF) paid a productive visit to the LSST summit site on Cerro Pachón in late September to review construction progress and interact with LSST Project senior management staff. A group photo from the event is available in the LSST Gallery.

The Laboratório Interinstitucional de e-Astronomia (LIneA) in Brazil held a meeting of the LSST Brazil Participation Group (BPG) on Sept 24-28. Representatives from LSST Data Management (DM), Communications, and Education and Public Outreach (EPO) were invited to present progress on their efforts, and to review the LIneA science and technical activities. A group photo from the event is available in the LSST Gallery, and the LSST presentations can be found at this link.

The transport cart for the Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) Cell Assembly has been completed at CAID Industries in Tucson, AZ. On the summit of Cerro Pachón, this cart will be used to safely detach M1M3 from the telescope and transport it to the Coating Plant for periodic maintenance of the mirror. A video of the cart undergoing testing at CAID is available in the LSST Gallery.

The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) and the LSST Transients and Variable Stars Science Collaboration (TVS) have teamed up to build the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC) which is being hosted on the Kaggle platform. The intent of the challenge is to develop new algorithms to classify the tens of thousands of astronomical transients LSST will discover each night during Operations. Considerable prize money is available for the winners! The challenge opened on September 28, and will run through December 17. Click here for more information.

The LSST Project Science Team (PST) had a face-to-face meeting at SLAC on September 19-21. The meeting was focused on the integration of subsystems and the challenges of LSST commissioning. The PST will be taking an increasingly larger role in technical system-level coordination as subsystems come together, and will directly support the commissioning team. The main topics discussed at the meeting included integration challenges for the Auxiliary Telescope, the integration of software from the various subsystems within the project, a discussion of requirements for the blue edge of the u band filter, and an exploration of possible synergies between various data visualization tools needed by the commissioning team, by the EPO effort, and by LSST scientists.

Personnel News

Franco Colleoni joined the Telescope and Site subsystem as Assistant Electronic Engineer on October 1. In this role, he will assist with design, fabrication, installation, and operations of the instrumentation required during the Telescope Assembly, Integration, and Verification (AIV) on the LSST summit site on Cerro Pachón in Chile.

Claudio Araya joined the Telescope and Site Group on October 1 as Coating Technician, based in Chile. Claudio will support the necessary preparations for the Coating Plant’s arrival on Cerro Pachón, and will work with Von Ardenne personnel to install the Coating Plant in the summit facility.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2018

October 18-20: Society for Women Engineers (SWE) Conference, Minneapolis, MN

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*

November 11-15: 28th Annual Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) Meeting, College Park, MD

November 12-15: Supercomputing 2018, Dallas, TX

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

2019

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

January 16-17: AMCL Meeting, Tucson, AZ

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