rubinann16039 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 21 October 2016

21 October 2016

Project News

Project progress this week included: A status review for the Operations Control Software and Telescope Control Software is taking place this week in Tucson; the L2 camera lens has entered the fine grinding stage; the SDSS Stripe 82 data has been staged into the prototype Data Access Center (DAC) storage area at NCSA to enable early tests of the LSST DAC; and the first LSST hardware integration between vendors is taking place on Cerro Pachón, a major milestone!   

Twenty-nine LSST proceedings papers from the 2016 SPIE meeting on Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation in Edinburgh have been added to the public website on the Publications page.  Search “All Project and Science Publications” by type “SPIE” to view a linked list of the documents. 

Last week President Obama hosted the 2016 White House Frontiers Conference, a national convening co-hosted with (LSSTC Institutional Members) the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University to explore the future of innovation. Science Collaboration Coordinator Lucianne Walkowicz gave a “Lightning Talk” in the Interplanetary track of the conference, sharing the stage with NSF Director Dr. France Cordova who spoke on the discovery of gravitational waves.  LSST Science Advisory Council (SAC) member Dr. Amy Mainzer talked about the search for potentially hazardous asteroids, Dr. Jedidah Isler spoke about the essential need for diversity and inclusion in STEM, and Dr. Wanda Diaz Merced spoke about improving access to astronomy.  Also as part of the conference, the University of Pittsburgh held the 2016 "White House Astronomy Night" at their Allegheny Observatory, a follow-up to the 2015 event held at the White House. Science Collaboration members Michael Wood-Vasey, Jeff Newman, Rachael Bean, and other LSST-involved faculty staffed an LSST booth near the 20-30 amateur astronomy telescopes set up for the event, available to talk to any and all about LSST and the quest to understand dark energy and dark matter. 

Check out the new LSST Logo storefront at Lands’ End.   At this time there are two LSST logos to choose from and they can be applied to any item in the Lands’ End product line.  As our construction funding cannot be used to purchase these sort of items, the storefront provides a way for team members and the broad community to show their LSST pride.

Corporation News

Since the end of September, LSSTC has been supporting the instant messaging tool Slack to promote communications between science collaboration members and project team members.  The Slack channels are seeing quite a bit of use, with 149 people reading and 104 people posting, out of 284 members (so far).  A total of 1,609 messages have been posted in the past three weeks, presumably preventing 1,609 email messages from clogging up individual inboxes!

Personnel News

Michelle Gower has joined the Data Management subsystem as Senior Research Programmer at NCSA.  Michelle will be applying her expertise in designing and supporting operation of astronomy data management systems, developing the file management and movement fabric of the Data Backbone.  Michelle has been working at NCSA for 15 years. For the past 9 years she has been on the Dark Energy Survey Data Management (DESDM) team as the principal software engineer for the data processing and management framework.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2016

October 16 – 21: LSST Workshop and Solar System Science Collaboration Meeting @ DPS 48 / EPSC 11, Pasadena, CA

October 27 - 29: Society of Women Engineers Meeting, Philadelphia, PA

November 7 – 9: LSST Operations Plan Review, Tucson, AZ

November 7-11: LSST DESC Hack Week *, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

November 16-18: Preparing for Supernova Science in the LSST Era: A Kick-Off Workshop *University of Pittsburgh, PA

December 1-2: Precision Astronomy with Fully Depleted CCDs*, BNL

December 12 - 13: Towards Science in Chile with the LSST 2016 *Viña del Mar, Chile

December 13 - 14: AURA Workforce and Diversity Committee (WDC), Tucson, AZ

2017

January 3: ZTF Community Workshop at AAS 229*, Grapevine, TX

January 3: LSST AGN Science Collaboration Roadmap Development Meeting* AAS 229 Meeting; Grapevine, TX

January 3 - 7: AAS 229, Grapevine, TX.  LSST’s Open House is 7:30 – 9:00p, on Wednesday, January 4th.

February 2 – 3: AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) Meeting, Tucson, AZ

February 13-17: DESC Meeting, Dark Energy School, and Hack Day*, SLAC National Accelerator Lab

March 15 - 17: Supernovae Workshop *, Northwestern University, IL

April 3-7: LSST DESC Hack Week *, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

May 22 – 25: Infrastructure for Time Domain Science in the Era of LSST, Tucson, AZ

July 10-14: DESC Meeting, Dark Energy School, and Hack Day*, Brookhaven National Lab

August 14 – 18: LSST 2017 Project & Community Workshop, Tucson, AZ