rubinann16040 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 28 October 2016

28 October 2016

Project News

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, has teamed up with two Princeton professors, LSST Science Advisory Committee chair Michael Strauss and J. Richard Gott, to discuss fundamental questions about the birth of the Universe and the latest discoveries by modern astrophysicists in their new book Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour.   LSST is mentioned in this October 26th interview about the book, produced by WNYC.

An LSST Workshop and Solar System Science Collaboration Meeting took place @DPS 48 / EPSC 11, in Pasadena, CA, last week.  A summary and pictures can be found here.

Efforts in all areas of the project are coming together and leading toward operations.  Hardware integration has begun on the summit as reported last week.  A Telescope Assembly Integration and Verification Plan review will take place in Tucson next week, to examine planning for the period after contractors have finished and turned the site over to the Project but before Commissioning begins.  A review of the Commissioning Plan has been scheduled for January 24 – 26, 2017.  Meanwhile, many team members are preparing for the Operations Plan Review taking place in less than two weeks.    

LSST Director Steve Kahn and Project Manager Victor Krabbendam met with AURA President Matt Mountain and others last week in Chile to discuss plans for coordinating resources among Gemini, NOAO, and LSST, during the time of LSST operations.  A matrixed organizational structure is envisioned, combining co-located AURA resources so they can be efficiently deployed in support of AURA’s ground-based southern-hemisphere observatories.

Bill Gressler has been in Chile this week and reports that 3 of 16 sections of the embedded Dome rail plates have been aligned on the lower enclosure concrete forms.  The Pflow lift tower assembly is progressing, with 3 of 6 steel structure columns installed (this is the first 1/3 of the ~90 foot tower) with 12 more long columns to go.  In preparation for shipping the TMA and coating plant components to Chile, Bill met with representatives from the port of Coquimbo and vendor reps to better understand possible shipping configurations.

LSST's ombuds group had their monthly meeting with Steve Kahn, Beth Willman, and Victor Krabbendam this week. The discussion topics included inviting new ombuds people from our colleagues in Chile, team morale, and workplace culture.  

Several LSST team members attended the ADASS XXI Conference, followed by IVOA Interoperability Workshop, last week in Trieste, Italy.  Programs and presentations are available on the respective websites, linked in the previous sentence.

Corporation News

An LSSTC-funded workshop has just been announced on the LSST Community Forum: "Getting Ready for Doing Science with LSST Data" will be held in Lyon, France, where the IN2P3 computing center is located, from June 12th to 16th, 2017.  The event website is online and will be updated as additional information becomes available. 

Personnel News

Tim Jenness (presently the Deputy System Architect) will transition to being the acting Data Management (DM) Systems Engineer. Over the next few months, Tim will be engaged in substantial work on DM System requirements, traceability, and verification reducing.  This change splits out some of the DM Systems Engineering tasks from DM System Architecture, allowing Tim to focus on the processes being in place and executed so that the final (extremely complex) system can be built and verified by a large team.

Determining the optimal observing strategy to simultaneously achieve LSST’s multiple science goals is performed via a complex scheduling algorithm - the “Scheduler”. The Scheduler is the brain of the LSST survey and is now in construction as part of the Telescope and Site (T&S) group.  Heads up: the job of the LSST Survey Scientist, who will lead the scheduler effort at the project level, will appear in the November AAS job register and on the LSST Hiring Page.

Dr. Eric Bellm, presently the Project Scientist for the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) project at Caltech, has agreed to join the LSST as the Level 1 Science Lead for DM, starting February 1, 2017. He will assume this role at the University of Washington, where he is joining the Department of Astronomy as a Research Professor. Eric's research interests span a number of topics, including compact binaries and GRBs. His extensive background in time domain surveys as well as instrumentation will make a tremendous addition to an already strong team at UW.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2016

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(lin *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. 

January 24 - 26: Commissioning Review, SLAC National Accelerator Lab

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

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

May 31-June 2: Supernovae Workshop *, Northwestern University, IL

June 12 – 16: Getting Ready for Doing Science with LSST Data, Lyon, France

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

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