Rubin Digest 09 May 2024

14 May 2024

Project and Science News

Rubin’s 8.4-meter Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) was successfully coated with protected silver on April 27th, a major milestone for the Project that Rubin announced with a press release including images and timelapse video, and an impactful social media campaign. Read the details about the coating team’s achievement on rubinobservatory.org, and see a fun group photo with the coated mirror in the Gallery.

Reminder to register for the Rubin Community Workshop at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, CA on July 22-26. Payment is required to secure your spot, and in-person registration will be capped at 250 in-person attendees. The room block at the SLAC guest house expires on May 13th — if you’re unable to secure a room there, information about alternate lodging is on the meeting website.

The LSST Camera team at SLAC have been busy preparing to ship the LSST Camera, and all support equipment, to Chile later this month. After SLAC’s official completion announcement in mid-April, the Camera was mounted to a custom shipping frame, wrapped in electrostatic discharge plastic to protect it from moisture, and installed in a 20 ft shipping container (see photos). The Filter Exchange hardware and spare shutter have also been packed in separate crates, and the team is currently working on finalizing logistical details.

A new documentation website, https://survey-strategy.lsst.io, is now available to help pull together information about the current baseline survey strategy and will contain future reports on survey progress, as well as Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC) updates. This site also provides links to survey simulations and metric outputs, as well as documentation and tutorials for rubin-sim and rubin-scheduler, software packages useful for creating and evaluating survey simulations.

Data Management (DM), working with the IT Team in Chile, have demonstrated the ability to run pipelines on the commissioning computing cluster (yagan) on Cerro Pachón. Rubin's active optics system (AOS) team ran their wavefront estimation code on simulated ComCam data, displaying the results for the summit observing team using RubinTV. As soon as the project begins taking images with ComCam, the highest priority will be to align the optics (the M1M3 mirror, the M2 mirror, and the camera). The ability to rapidly analyze and visualize the data will enable informed decisions about how to tune the system.

Operations Updates: 

The South/America Africa Astronomy Coordination Committee (SA3CC) met at SLAC last week for its annual meeting. The meeting is organized by AmLight, the research and education network (REN) project run by Florida International University through a cooperative agreement with the NSF. AmLight is the project through which Rubin secures its guaranteed bandwidth for the long haul network (LHN) from Chile to Atlanta. The Rubin Operations Director, Deputy, and members of the US Data Facility and DevOps teams participated. Participants heard about the excellent status of Rubin Project, Operations, networking, and multi-site processing. Other talks covered progress at high altitude experiments in Chile investigating the early universe via the Cosmic Microwave Background. The SA3CC meeting was followed by the Rubin NET meeting, a technical meeting concentrating on the details of Rubin’s LHN and its performance.

The Rubin/Euclid DDP Implementation Group has extended the deadline (to May 8th) for this community survey in order to seek out and identify individuals and/or research groups who are interested in investing significant effort in the creation of Rubin-Euclid Derived Data Products (DDP) that will be widely distributed within the astronomical community.

Personnel Announcements & Opportunities:

Dan Fuchs joined Rubin Data Management’s SQuaRE (Service Quality and Reliability Engineering) team as a senior devops engineer on April 29th. Based remotely as an employee of SLAC, Dan will be working on the infrastructure that underpins the Rubin Science Platform and other SQuaRE services.

Visit the Rubin hiring page to see all open positions with Rubin.

Info for Project Members:

Nominate someone for Rubin’s staff awards program to recognize outstanding performance! More information and the nomination form are available on the Staff Awards page on the Project website (login required).

If you’d like to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Victor or Zeljko, please fill out this form to indicate your preferred date and time.

The link to Rubin’s anonymous “suggestion box” will be changing soon, until a new link is announced please contact our Workplace Culture Advocates (login required) with your suggestions.

Rubin Observatory swag items, including t-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags, and more, are available for purchase in our not-for-profit online store.

Upcoming Meetings with Rubin Observatory Involvement

(those with an asterisk* are supported by LSST Discovery Alliance):

2024

May 6-8	AURA Management Council for Rubin Observatory (AMCR) Meeting, Tucson, AZ
June 10-14	LSST@LATAM, La Serena, Chile
June 16-21	SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation Meeting, Yokohama, Japan
June 17-18 or June 20-21	DP0 Rubin Data Academy, virtual
July 8-12	DESC Collaboration Meeting, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
July 22-25	Catching Supermassive Black Holes with Rubin-LSST, Turin, Italy
July 22-26	Rubin Community Workshop (formerly PCW), SLAC Menlo Park, CA
September 16-20	LSST@Europe6, La Palma, Spain*
November 10-14	Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems (ADASS), Malta

Upcoming Deadlines:

2024

June 14	Registration deadline for DP0 Rubin Data Academy
June 21	Registration deadline for the Rubin Community Workshop 2024 (if the 250 limit is not reached earlier)