Rubin Observatory Digest for 04 April 2023

4 April 2023

Project & Science News

April is Celebrate Diversity Month, and at Rubin Observatory we celebrate diversity year-round. When people with different perspectives and backgrounds come together, the result is better conversations, better questions, and better science. Did you know that Rubin has a Workplace Culture Advocate Program, and its mission is to promote inclusive, respectful, and fruitful collaboration between all our Rubin project personnel? Find out more about this program on the Rubin website.

Members of the Data Management, SIT-COM, Telescope & Site, and Camera teams gathered in La Serena, Chile, on March 14-17 for a Joint Subsystem Meeting. The meeting was a chance for intensive collaboration and planning between the teams as interfaces between Rubin hardware and software systems continue to increase during commissioning. Data Management staff toured the summit site, many for the first time, to better understand Rubin Observatory’s hardware components and to experience the intensity and complexity of summit activities first-hand. Photos from the busy week are available in the Gallery.

At SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the LSST Camera team recently moved the camera onto the integration stand and are now preparing it for a 10-week functional and electro-optical test run. The testing will round out past test campaigns and is intended to fully verify that all camera requirements are met and that the camera is ready to ship to the summit. The move onto the integration stand was the last big crane lift of the camera before it’s packed for shipping. The lift was categorized as a Category 1 enhanced-rigor lift, with high visibility in the lab and with SLAC’s funding agency, the US Department of Energy (DOE). All went according to the procedures and lift plans. Photos of the lift are available in the Gallery.

Rubin Observatory met a major construction milestone last week, when the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA), the structure that will soon support the observatory’s optical system, was declared substantially complete. That designation means that testing of the TMA has proven it’s functioning well enough to be safely and beneficially turned over to the Rubin team for integration of other components. The summit team is now preparing for the next major phase of systems integration: installing the Primary/Tertiary mirror (M1M3) cell with its surrogate mirror on the TMA. Even with the achievement of this auspicious milestone, the Spain-based consortium UTE, responsible for building the TMA and installing it on the summit, will continue to address a "punch list" of lingering issues and completion tasks over the coming weeks leading to final acceptance and contract conclusion.

Since March 10th, data from the Engineering Facilities Database (EFD) has been reliably flowing from the summit to the US Data Facility (USDF) at SLAC National Laboratory in California. The EFD is the central repository for telemetry data from different subsystems relating to the Rubin summit facility, both on the summit and elsewhere. During operations, Rubin will produce a telemetry stream of 6.4 MB/s (or 540GB/day). The current mechanism uses the Long Haul Network to ensure the data is replicated to the USDF with low latency. With this solution, Rubin staff can query the EFD at USDF, offloading the summit computing resources. Congratulations to the Chile IT team and staff at the USDF for this achievement.

Registration is now open for “The Transient & Variable Universe” conference, to be held June 20-22 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). More information is available on the meeting website.

Of interest to the science community: Applications are open for the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) summer school which will take place on July 24-28 at the University of Minnesota. The school will be run in a hybrid mode with the option for in-person and remote attendance. The ZTF summer school is designed for master's and graduate students with strong research interests in time-domain astronomy. More information is available at this link.

Rubin in the Media:

A recent article in the science news magazine Eos, “Deluges of Data are Changing Astronomical Science,” discusses Rubin Observatory and the LSST archive as they relate to democratic access to data. The article includes an interview with Leanne Guy, Data Management Scientist for Rubin.

Operations Updates:

More than 100 people from institutions around the world participated in a virtual workshop, "Supporting Computational Science with Rubin LSST," on March 21-22. The workshop, hosted by NOIRLab and led by Knut Olsen (Rubin/NOIRLab), welcomed anyone involved in the process of turning LSST data into science, especially those requiring specific computational hardware or software. NOIRLab staff members Aaron Meisner and Yuanyuan Zhang, among others, participated as scientific moderators. The meeting focused on science use cases with Rubin LSST, and how these might be paired with specific In-Kind contributed computing resources (Independent Data Access Centers and Scientific Processing Centers (IDACs and SPCs). The Rubin IDACs Coordination Group plans to use information gathered at the workshop to help identify potential partners among the group of Rubin IDACs to support the science cases, and to help facilitate fruitful interaction between partners.

LSST Corporation News:

LSSTC would like to congratulate the new LSSTC Executive Board Chair, Michael Wood-Vasey and LSSTC Executive Board Vice Chair, Kathryn Johnston, effective May 1st, 2023. We wish them well in their new roles. We would also like to thank Lucas Macri for his years of service and dedication to LSSTC as the Executive Board Chair. Lucas will be stepping down in April 2023 to take on a new role with NOIRLab. We wish him the best.

Personnel Announcements & Opportunities:

Open positions with Rubin Observatory can be found on the Rubin hiring page.

Info for Project Members:

It’s not too late to submit a photo for the next “Day in the Life of Rubin” (DITL) video; we’re accepting uploads at this link until April 6th.

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.

There is also an anonymous “suggestion box” for anyone to offer feedback at this link.

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

Upcoming Meetings with Rubin Observatory Involvement 

(those with an asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2023
May 18-19	AURA Management Council for Rubin Observatory (AMCR) meeting, location TBA
June 12-16	Statistical Changes in Modern Astronomy (SCMA) VIII, Pennsylvania State University
July 24-28	Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) Meeting, SLAC
August 7-11	Rubin 2023 Project & Community Workshop, Tucson, AZ
August 21-25	Joint Status Review, Tucson
September 25-29	LSST@Europe5, Poreč, Croatia
November 5-9	Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems (ADASS) conference, Tucson, AZ[]

Upcoming Deadlines:

2023
March 17	Apply for the Data Science Fellowship Program (DSFP)

Your contributions to the Rubin Observatory News Digest are welcomed. Please email updates or items of general interest to communications-team@lists.lsst.org. Rubin Observatory News Digest archives and other Rubin Observatory news items are available online at http://lsst.org/news.