Rubin Digest 12 February 2019

12 February 2019

Project & Science News

The LSST Project is distributed and complex, and understanding the relationships between its participating organizations and affiliates can be challenging. A new diagram, “The LSST Ecosystem,” represents these relationships visually. The diagram can be accessed in the LSST Gallery; we encourage you to use it in presentations and documents when appropriate.

The Filter Exchange team in France is making significant progress on the construction of the manual loader and the auto-changer, two important components of the filter exchange system installed on the LSST Camera. This system will accommodate LSST’s six filters, each of which is 30 inches (76 cm) in diameter and weighs about 88 pounds (40 kg). IN2P3 is on track to complete the fabrication of the filter exchange system by the end of the second quarter of 2019. Recent photos of the filter exchange system are available in the LSST Gallery.

Coating of the LSST Camera L3 lens has been completed at Safran-Reosc in France; all three of the camera lenses have now been successfully coated. Read more about the process in this article. 

At the LSST Summit Facility on Cerro Pachón, the Dome Rear Access Door (RAD) was successfully installed on January 24. The Dome RAD weighs about 10 tons, and measures approximately 72 feet (22 meters). Photos of the installation are available in the LSST Gallery.

A Differential Image Motion Monitor (DIMM) that will be used to monitor atmospheric turbulence on Cerro Pachón recently underwent a series of tests at the LSST Project Office in Tucson. Read more details about the DIMM in this recent LSST news post.

Meg Schwamb, Chair of the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration (SSSC), gave a presentation on LSST Solar System Science (excluding Near-Earth Objects) at the 20th NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) meeting, held January 29-31.The SBAG is comprised of planetary scientists, planetary astronomers, and mission experts and engineers who provide input to NASA on planning and prioritizing the exploration of Solar System small bodies. More information and a link to the presentation can be found here.  

A major product of the nightly processing of LSST images is a world-public stream of alerts from transient, variable, and moving sources. Science users may access these alerts through third-party community brokers that will receive the LSST alerts, add scientific value, and redistribute them to the scientific community. A new document, “Plans and Policies for LSST Alert Distribution,” provides an overview of LSST alert production and describes the process through which community brokers will be selected. The next step in the selection of community brokers will be a call for Letters of Intent in the next few weeks, with a due date in late spring 2019.

LSST in the Media

Margery Morse, Mechanical Designer at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, was featured in the cover story of the January 23 issue of The Almanac. The profile article details her contributions to the LSST Camera. Read the article at this link.    

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2019

Feb 25 - Mar 1: Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) Dark Energy School, Collaboration Meeting, and Hack Day.*

March 6-9: Towards Science in Chile with LSST Workshop, La Serena, Chile

March 26-27: Project Science Team (PST) meeting, Tucson, AZ

April 1-2: AMCL Meeting, Pasadena, CA

April 8-9: LSST Corporation Institutional Board Face to Face Meeting, Phoenix, AZ

May 20-23: LSST@Asia, Sydney, Australia*

August 19-28: La Serena School for Data Science: Applied Tools for Data-driven Sciences, La Serena, Chile