rubinann17020 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 14 September 2017

14 September 2017

Project & Science News

The NSF/DOE Joint Status Review (JSR) took place in Tucson Sept 6-8, in parallel with a separate Earned Value Management System surveillance review covering only the NSF-funded activities.   The JSR committee was charged with assessing the current status of the project and to evaluate plans for the future, with emphasis on the next year of construction.  The overall consensus of the review committee is that the Project is going very well.

This Thursday, Sept 14 the day for LSST Project participants to submit photos for LSST’s next “Day in the Life” (DITL) video.  This is our 3rd DITL video and again we hope to get a view of the full breadth of LSST effort being applied on a typical day in LSST construction.  Previous versions of the video can be found at the LSST YouTube channel.

Updated information on the LSST Deep Drilling Fields has been added to LSST’s public website.  Deeper coverage and more frequent temporal sampling (in at least some of the LSST’s ugrizy filters) will be obtained for the Deep Drilling Fields than for typical points on the sky. Community input is encouraged.  

A white paper titled “Science-Driven Optimization of the LSST Observing Strategy” has been posted to the arXiv.  This white paper presents work done by an active sub-community of the LSST science collaborations on evaluating simulations of the LSST cadence, in support of a science-driven process to set LSST’s observing strategy.  Links to the posted paper, and the living document under development in GitHub, can be accessed on the LSST For Scientists page here.    

Rachel Bean of Cornell University has joined the LSST Science Advisory Committee. Rachel is a cosmologist with particular interest in tests for primordial non-Gaussianity and modified gravity theories. Rachel is an active member of the Dark Energy Science Collaboration, and has recently stepped down as DESC spokesperson.  

The elevation drives, Primary/tertiary mirror (M1M3) surrogate, and pylons have been painted and installed on the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) in Asturfeito, Spain. The elevation central section is now being assembled; once it’s complete, the upper pylons and the top end of the telescope will be mounted as shown here.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2017

September 14 – 15: AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) Meeting, Tucson, AZ

September 20-22: NSF Site visit, La Serena, Chile

September 26-28: Education and Public Outreach (EPO) subsystem review, Tucson, AZ

October 19, 4:30-6:30 pm: LSST and the Solar System Workshop at the 49th American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting, Provo, UT

October 22-26: Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) Conference, Santiago, Chile

October 26-28: Society of Women Engineers WE17 Conference, Austin, TX

October 27-29: International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) meeting, Santiago, Chile

November 30 - December 1: AURA Workforce & Diversity Committee (WDC), Baltimore, MD

2018

January 8-12: American Astronomical Society (AAS) 231st Meeting, National Harbor, MD

January 10: LSST Town Hall at AAS 231, 7:30 pm

February 5: Dark Energy School, SLAC, CA

June 10-15: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation Meeting, Austin, TX