Rubin Digest 23 April 2019

23 April 2019

Project & Science News

Please mark your calendars: The LSST 2019 Project and Community Workshop will take place August 12-16 at the Hilton El Conquistador in Tucson, AZ. More details will be provided as they are available.

The LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3), aboard the BBC Manitoba, is rapidly making its way south to Chile. The ship passed through the Panama Canal on April 15, and after a few stops at ports along the way, it is scheduled to arrive in Coquimbo, Chile, in May. See the ship’s most recent location at this link.

The M1M3 cell will soon be following the mirror to Chile; it was wrapped for shipping at vendor CAID Industries in Tucson last week and then loaded onto the 120-foot-long vehicle that will transport it to Houston, Texas. Photos of the cell being loaded on April 18th are available in the LSST Gallery.

The final test campaign for the vertical platform lift designed and fabricated by PFlow industries, which will be used to move heavy LSST components between floors of the LSST summit facility building, was completed last week. The lift was loaded with barrels containing approximately 18,500 gallons (70,000 liters) of water. With the weight of the tanks themselves and the detachable lift-up roof, the lift successfully raised about 94 tons (85,650 kg) of weight, which simulates the maximum payload of the M1M3 mirror and cell in its cart. A video of the lift in action during the tests is available in the LSST Gallery.

The LSST Data Management team held a Final Design Review of the LSST Science Platform (LSP) on April 10-12. This was a formal and internal review of the planned LSP capabilities during LSST Operations. The panel consisted of eight LSST stakeholders drawn from both the LSST project and science collaborations, and one external expert in the field, who were asked to provide an evaluation of the vision, design, and current implementation status against the LSST science requirements. Overall the feedback was very positive. The panel provided a closeout briefing of their preliminary findings, outlining their recommendations, questions, and concerns. A full and final report will be delivered two weeks from the close of the review. A group photo from the event is available in the LSST Gallery.

LSST staff in Chile hosted a visit from AURA leadership on April 16-17. AURA President Matt Mountain toured the LSST base facility; and Val Schnader, Vice President for Operations/Chief of Staff toured the LSST summit facility. The visit was an opportunity for AURA leadership to view LSST construction progress.

LSST int the Media

Amanda Bauer, LSST Head of EPO, was interviewed during a visit to the LSST construction site in Chile for a recent episode of the podcast Looking Up, titled, “Meet the LSST.” You can listen to it at this link.

Information for Project Members

Below is the fifth in our ongoing series of reminders about individual communication channels used within the LSST Project. Information about all LSST communication channels can be found in Document-28656.

The featured communication tool is the LSST Community Forum, or community.lsst.org. This is a place for open discussion between Project and science community members, and for posting public announcements. Because this is an open forum, sensitive topics should not be discussed here. As with Slack, tasks should not be assigned here, and decisions made in a Community forum thread must be documented elsewhere.

Personnel News

Giovanni Corvetto has been promoted to LSST Safety Supervisor in Chile. In this role, Giovanni will be providing safety leadership for LSST construction sites and will join Safety Manager Chuck Gessner in representing the LSST safety team to both internal and external stakeholders.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2019

May 3-4: 2nd Workshop on LSST Detection of Optical Counterparts of Gravitational Wave Events, New York, NY*

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

June 19-21: LSST Community Broker Workshop (invitational), Seattle, WA

July 15-19: LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) meeting, APC, Paris, France

August 5-7: LSST Dark Matter Workshop 2019, Chicago, IL*

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

August 19-28: La Serena School for Data Science: Applied Tools for Data-driven Sciences, La Serena, Chile

August 25-29: NSF/DOE Joint Status Review, Tucson, AZ

October 22-24: Kavli From Petabytes to Science Workshop, Boston, MA