Building the Infrastructure for Time-Domain Alert Science in the LSST Era

 Building the Infrastructure for Time-Domain Alert Science in the LSST Era

The era of large-scale time-domain astronomical surveys has arrived. Current projects (e.g., Catalina Sky Survey, the Palomar Transient Factory, Pan-STARRS) demonstrate the tremendous scientific potential of the time domain, and future facilities (e.g., Zwicky Transient Facility and LSST) are about to expand the scale of time-domain astronomy exponentially. Because the volume and rate of alerts will be well beyond the ability of individual investigators to process, the astronomical community will need a time-domain ecosystem equipped with software to generate, validate, and filter alerts, as well as systems to schedule, coordinate, and analyze follow-up observations.

Open access time on federally-funded facilities (e.g., SOAR, Blanco, Gemini, Las Cumbres Observatory), in combination with public brokers and alert streams, offers the opportunity to develop a full-fledged time-domain follow-up system. To foster the development of such a system, NOAO and Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) will host a workshop on “Building the Infrastructure for Time-Domain Alert Science in the LSST Era” 22-25 May 2017 in Tucson.

The workshop will bring together astronomers and others working on a wide variety of technical and scientific issues related to time-domain alerts. In addition, there will be an opportunity to explore the science that can be done with the LCO network using the newly available public component of their network. It will also begin the planning and implementation of a time-domain system infrastructure that can take advantage of the resources available now as well as lay the groundwork for the opportunities LSST will present.

The goal of the workshop is to produce, for NOAO, LCO, and the ground-based OIR system, a plan for development of the time-domain ecosystem infrastructure and science programs that can begin to take advantage of resources available now. Register at https://noirlab.edu/science/events/websites/lsst-tds.