Rubin Digest 17 December 2019

17 December 2019

Project & Science News

The LSST Project Offices wishes everyone relaxing holidays and a Happy New Year! The LSST 2019 Holiday Card can be viewed at this link, and a news item highlighting some major LSST milestones achieved in 2019 is available here.

The 2019 Day in the Life of LSST video is now available; you can view it at this link. Thank you to everyone who participated!

LSST is finalizing plans for the open house to be held Monday, January 6th from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Winter meeting. A vast amount of important information is on the agenda, so we encourage you to attend if you’ll be at the meeting. Info and presentations will also be made available after the meeting, so watch for announcements. Additionally LSST will be staffing booth #603G in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Pavilion of the Exhibit Hall on January 5-8. Follow @lsst_astronomy on twitter for updates on daily booth activities. 

The loader and autochanger, two components of the LSST filter exchange system, traveled from France to the US by ship and have now been delivered to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (the carousel arrived by air from France in October). All three parts of the filter exchange system are now in the clean room at SLAC, and a team from IN2P3 has traveled to SLAC for testing and integration of the filter exchange system with the LSST Camera. 

The LSST Data Management (DM) team has released Version 19.0.0 of the LSST Science Pipelines. This is the latest periodic release, following version 18.1.0, which came out in August. See the release announcement and get links to documentation at this link. 

The Telescope and Site team and System Integration, Test & Commissioning team from LSST, along with personnel from vendor Tekninker, have had success with early integration activities on the summit in recent weeks. The Camera Cable Wrap, the rotator, and the pointing component have been integrated together through the latest version of the Service Abstraction Layer (SAL) for testing. SAL is the intermediary between high-level software control and the hardware. The team identified minor operational restrictions, which will be addressed before the next round of testing, but in general the subsystems are working together well.

LSST Corporation News

The LSST Corporation is conducting a campaign to raise funds to sponsor undergraduate students to attend the LSST 2020 Project and Community Workshop. The student program has been a successful part of the LSST PCW for the last two years; photos of the students presenting their  posters at the workshop are available in the LSST Gallery. For more information on sponsorship opportunities visit the LSST Corporation website. Don’t forget, the Corporation is a 501(c)3 charitable organization and as such, any donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law. 

Personnel News

Congratulations to Dr. Amanda Bauer who has assumed the role of Interim Deputy Director for LSST Operations. LSST Operations has a deputy director role from both its operations partners, SLAC and NSF’s OIR Lab. Amanda will join Dr. Phil Marshall (Deputy Director at SLAC) this fiscal year to help support (among other things) the key activity of delivering a successful LSST full survey operations proposal (to be submitted to a joint agency review in April, 2020). Amanda is committing 25% of her time to this role while maintaining her focus on the LSST Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Construction Project effort. In her time as a member of the LSST management team, Amanda has demonstrated leadership, ability to organize and build teams, and deliver on project milestones. 

The Operations Directorate is joined in its effort by a number of individuals from LSST Construction working a fraction of their time on Operations planning. The leadership appointments are (also as interim appointments): Dr. William O’Mullane, Associate Director for LSST Operations, Data Production Department; Dr. Leanne Guy, Associate Director for LSST Operations, System Performance Department; Dr. Chuck Claver, Associate Director for LSST Operations, Observatory Operations Department; and Dr. Amanda Bauer, Head of EPO LSST Operations.

LSST welcomes Jose Pinto to the LSST Education and Public Outreach (EPO) team, starting December 3rd, as a Web Designer. Jose will lead the visual and user interface design for web products built for the public. He will help develop the overall design for an impactful LSST Operations website, create engaging astronomy visualizations, and help generate brand awareness for the LSST project. 

The Telescope and Site (T&S) subsystem welcomes Hernan Herrera, starting with LSST on December 13th as a Mechanical Engineer. Hernan is a member of the T&S Assembly, Integration, and Verification (AIV) summit team, and will manage the dome activities in coordination with the team from dome vendor EIE Group. 

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2020

January 4-8: American Astronomical Society (AAS) 235th Meeting, Honolulu, HI

January 6: LSST Open House at AAS Meeting, Honolulu, HI 

January 20-24: Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) Winter Collaboration Meeting, Tucson, AZ

January 22-23: AMCL Meeting, Tucson, AZ

January 24-25: Project Science Team (PST) Meeting, Tucson, AZ

March 17-19: LSST Algorithms Workshop, Princeton, NJ