Rubin Digest 19 May 2020

19 May 2020

Project & Science News

Planning is underway for virtual Rubin Observatory Project and Community activities that will take place the week of August 10-14, 2020 (in place of the in-person Workshop). Please keep these dates reserved on your calendar, and watch for more information coming soon.

Rubin Observatory has released an updated report on the evolving satellite constellation issue, detailing the work being done jointly by Rubin Observatory and SpaceX exploring different mitigation strategies. The updated report is available at this link. An article on the subject also appeared in the New York Times on May 6th. 

Limited work activities resumed on the LSST Camera at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory during the week of May 11th, with one person permitted in the Camera workspace to start preparing for the restart of the refrigeration system. In France, the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown has been lifted and IN2P3 is expected to conduct a phased and limited return to work in the next few months.

Regularly-scheduled inspections of the summit facility and equipment continue with social distancing and strict safety measures in place. The most recent inspection took place on May 12th and again included maintenance work on the Dome and TMA, including improvements for weather resistance in the coming months (photos here). No social distancing is necessary for you to get a look at the summit facility—our EarthCam is still taking an image every 15 minutes, and some of them are spectacular!

The Data Management Leadership Team (DMLT) met for a virtual face-to-face meeting on May 12-14. During the meeting, team members discussed a number of topics including the progressing plans for a cloud-based interim data facility for pre-operations, the design of the prompt processing system, ongoing middleware development, and ways that Data Management can prepare for the Project re-baselining that will happen once full construction activities resume. A photo from the meeting can be viewed in the Gallery. 

The latest round of simulated survey strategy experiments has been released by the LSST survey strategy team (details are available at this link). This set of simulations is the last to investigate individual survey strategy experiments before the team synthesizes and combines these into a set of potential baseline runs to send to the Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC). Your questions and feedback are encouraged at lsst.community.org.

LSST Corporation News

Congratulations to Meg Schwamb (Queen’s University, Belfast), who was re-elected as co-chair of the Rubin Observatory LSST Solar System Science Collaboration alongside David Trilling (Northern Arizona University). Meg will start her second 3-year term on June 1st, 2020. 

The deadline for the LSST Corporation’s Enabling Science Call for Proposals has been extended to  11:59pm (PDT), May 26, 2020. Details about the Call can be found on the LSSTCorp web page, and the proposal template is available at this link. 

Personnel Announcements

The Telescope and Site team is looking for an Electronics Engineer, based in La Serena, Chile. This individual will be part of the Assembly, Integration, and Verification (AIV) effort on Cerro Pachón. For details about the position visit the Rubin Observatory hiring web page. 

Upcoming Meetings with Rubin Observatory Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2020

May 27-28: AURA Management Council for Rubin Construction (AMCR) Meeting, Virtual

June 1-3: Supermassive Black Hole Studies with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), virtual meeting as part of AAS236

July 20-24: LSST DESC Meeting, Virtual

July 21-24: Joint Directors Review (JDR), Virtual

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

Aug 31-Sept 3: Joint Status Review, Menlo Park, CA

Sept 1-3: NSF Large Facilities Workshop, Alexandria, VA

Sept 23-24: AURA Management Council for Rubin Construction (AMCR) Meeting, Boston, MA

December 13-18: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation Conference, San Diego, CA