Rubin Digest 27 February 2019

27 February 2019

Project & Science News

As recently announced in the document "Plans and Policies for LSST Alert Distribution," the selection of community alert brokers to receive the full LSST alert stream begins with a call for Letters of Intent (LOI). The call for Letters of Intent and a submission template are now available at this link. Individuals at any institution worldwide are invited to submit four-page LOIs. For full consideration, LOIs should be submitted by May 15, 2019. Submission of an LOI is required in order to be invited to submit a full proposal. If you have questions, email lsst-community-brokers@lists.lsst.org.

The Kavli foundation has sponsored a series of AURA-organized workshops on the theme Petabytes to Science, the second of which was held February 12-14, 2019 in Las Vegas, NV. The aim of this workshop was to discuss important trends and technologies for data intensive astronomy, especially with LSST and WFIRST, and to formulate potential white papers. With a holistic approach, the approximately 30 participants built a single document encompassing several broad categories; this document will be made publicly available in a few weeks. LSST was represented at this workshop by William O’Mullane, Frossie Economou, Amanda Bauer, Yusra AlSayyad, and Eric Bellm.

On February 21st, The LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) successfully completed the second of two optical test campaigns at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab in Tucson, AZ. The mirror and its support systems are now being disassembled and will soon be prepared for transport by truck to the Port of Houston, TX, its departure point for shipping to Chile.

LSST Project Manager Victor Krabbendam and LSST Telescope and Site Technical Manager Shawn Callahan attended a successful pre-ship review of the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) at the Asturfeito factory in Spain on February 13th. The TMA is currently being disassembled and crated for shipping to Chile (see this photo in the LSST Gallery); the first containers are scheduled to leave Spain in early March.

LSST in the Media

LSST was featured in a recent article titled “An Astronomical Data Challenge,” published in Symmetry, a joint publication of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Fermilab. Read the full article here.

Information for Project Members

Confused about the many communication channels used within the LSST Project? We're here to help! Watch this space over the coming months for reminders about individual channels and how they should (and should not) be used by Project team members. For more information and a list of all available channels, please see Document-28656.

The current featured communications channel is Docushare, the required tool for archiving all Project documentation. Although documents can be developed using collaborative tools like Google Drive, Confluence, and Dropbox, once a document is completed or is being used for Project activities, it must be versioned and archived in Docushare. Rob McKercher, LSST Document Manager, can provide assistance if necessary: rmckercher@lsst.org

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2019

Feb 25 - Mar 1: Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) Dark Energy School, Collaboration Meeting and Hack Day.*

March 6-9: Towards Science in Chile with LSST Workshop, La Serena, Chile*

March 26-27: Project Science Team (PST) meeting, Tucson, AZ

April 1-2: AMCL Meeting, Pasadena, CA

April 8-9: LSST Corporation Institutional Board Face to Face Meeting, Phoenix, AZ

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

August 12-16: LSST 2019 Project and Community Workshop, Tucson, AZ