Rubin Digest 24 January 2020

24 January 2020

Project & Science News

The AAS Winter meeting in Honolulu was the occasion for announcing the Project’s new name: Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Rubin Observatory). The official announcement was made at an open house on Monday, January 6th by Ralph Gaume, Director of the NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences; Kathy Turner, DOE Office of High Energy Physics program manager; and Steve Kahn, Rubin Observatory Director. Watch the video clip of the live announcement here, and read the press release here. For the first ten years of operation Vera C. Rubin Observatory will perform the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, using the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera and the Simonyi Survey Telescope”

Following the renaming announcement, the Rubin Observatory open house featured presentations by Project Manager Victor Krabbendam, Deputy Director Zeljko Ivezic, Acting Director of Operations Bob Blum, Science Collaborations Coordinator Federica Bianco, and LSST Corporation Director of Science Jeno Sokoloski. Slides from these presentations are available at this link. 

Lots of new cladding has been added to the Rubin Observatory Dome, and refinements are being made on the provisional bridge crane in anticipation of a final check-out this week. This progress will enable the team from vendor Asturfeito to resume work on the Telescope Mount Assembly as planned. Recent photos of the dome and the crane are available in the Gallery.

The spectrograph for the Auxiliary Telescope (AuxTel) shipped from Tucson, AZ to Chile in late December. The instrument has now been installed on the AuxTel, and electrical and IT connection work is in progress. Engineering first light for the AuxTel spectrograph is expected this week. Photos of the installation are available in the Gallery.

A team from Von Ardenne, the manufacturer of the coating chamber, is in Chile to finish the configuration of the coating plant for the Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3). Last week the M1M3 mirror cell and M1M3 surrogate mirror were moved into place below the upper section of the coating chamber for fit testing and alignment of the magnetrons that will be used to apply the mirror’s reflective coating (see photos here). By the end of this visit the Rubin Observatory and Von Ardenne teams, using the M1M3 mirror surrogate, will produce different sets of coating samples to determine whether aluminum or silver will be used to coat the glass M1M3 mirror in 2021. 

A new workshop has been announced; Supernovae across LSST will be held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign on April 27-29, 2020. Registration is free and open until March 1st. For more details visit the workshop website.

Rubin Observatory in the Media

Articles about the Rubin Observatory renaming appeared in multiple popular publications, including the New York Times and The Atlantic, and Space.com, among others.

LSST Corporation News

The LSST Corporation and Las Cumbres Observatory have issued awards for developing follow-up capabilities, following an October 2019 workshop the two organizations partnered to present titled Managing Follow-up Observations in the Era of ZTF and LSST. Fifty scientists from all areas of astronomy, representing fourteen nations, participated in the workshop held at Carnegie Observatories. Participants submitted proposals (33) for observing time and seed funding to develop observational follow-up programs using Target and Observation Manager systems. Selected projects (15) cover a wide range of topics, from LIGO alert follow-ups to microlensing and supernova discoveries. More information about the workshop and the awards can be found at this link. 

Personnel News

Juan Orellana Muñoz joined the Camera team in the role of Mechanical Technician on January 2nd. Juan will support the camera refrigeration subsystem on the summit, as well as the summit HVAC and related systems. 

Morgan Schmitz joined the Data Management (DM) subsystem on January 6th in the role of DRP Software Scientist. As a member of the DM team based at Princeton, Morgan will focus on developing the Data Release Science Pipelines. 

Wouter van Reeven joined the Telescope and Site (T&S) subsystem as Senior Software Engineer on January 6th. Based in Chile, Wouter will be leading the T&S Software team in their duties to build the control systems for the telescope and surrounding buildings. 

Cristián Silva joined the Project as IT Manager in Chile on January 6th. Cristián will lead the IT team to coordinate and implement all IT needs at the Rubin Observatory Base Facility in La Serena as well as on the summit. 

Upcoming Meetings with Rubin Observatory Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2020

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: Rubin Observatory Algorithms Workshop, Princeton, NJ

April 14-16: Operations Proposal Review, Tucson, AZ

April 27-29: Supernovae Across LSST, Urbana-Champaign, IL*

June 8-12: LSST@Europe 4, Rome, Italy*

August 10-14: Rubin Observatory Project and Community Workshop 2020, Tucson, AZ