rubinann17003 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 27 January 2017

27 January 2017

Project News

The joint DOE/NSF LSST Commissioning Review took place this week at SLAC.  This review included a comprehensive assessment of the scope, cost, schedule, organization, and funding profile proposed for LSST Commissioning.  The maturity of plans to transition from commissioning to operations, and plans for the Environment, Safety, and Health aspects of commissioning were also evaluated.  The review went very well – The team received both helpful recommendations from an excellent review panel and compliments for their preparedness for the review.

With this week’s NSF approval, construction has begun on the expansion and renovation of the AURA and NOAO-S base facility in La Serena, Chile to accommodate LSST and also make improvements for NOAO and AURA.  The first phase of the work includes site preparation and renovation of the existing buildings.  The second phase of the work will involve construction of a new 2-story office building and a separate building to house the LSST Data Center.  More information and frequent updates, including a web cam, can be found here.

Congratulations to UW Research Scientist Maria Patterson for her selection as a runner-up in the “Search for Hidden Figures Contest", a contest to find the next generation of women who will lead the way in STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Maria, who works in the LSST Data Management Science Pipelines group, creatively programmed her winning video  from open source code and open data.  Read More. 

In fiber-optic news, the fiber has reached the summit facility! The only section left to install between the summit and Santiago is about 1 km crossing Highway 41, which is waiting on a permit from a Chilean Ministry.  Sections of the fiber will be spliced together and “lit” later this spring.  Installation is still on track to have 100 Gbps from the summit to Santiago by August, and to Florida shortly thereafter.  Next stop: Chicago. Stay tuned.

Corporation News

Session 2 of the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program wrapped up this week at Caltech in Pasadena, CA. The LSSTC DSFP Fellows were joined by 4 local graduate students from Caltech's astronomy department, and spent the week taking a deep dive into machine learning methods in astronomy.  

Personnel News

Two new jobs were added to the LSST Hiring Page this week, both based in Tucson:  a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to work with the Education and Public Outreach group, and a Software Engineer to work with the Observatory Control System group, part of the Telescope & Site subsystem.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2017

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

February 27 – March 2: Detecting the Unexpected: Discovery in the Era of Astronomically Big Data*, STScI, Baltimore, MD

March 6 - 8: LSST Joint Technical Meeting, Glendale, CA

March 13 - 15: Blind Analysis in High-Stakes Survey Science: When, Why, and How? *SLAC; Menlo Park, CA

April 3 - 5: LSSTC F2F Board Meeting and Hill Visits, Washington, DC

April  6 & 7: AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) Meeting, Washington, DC

April 3-7: LSST DESC Hack Week *, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

May 1 – 3: NSF Large Facilities Workshop, Baton Rouge and Livingston, LA

May 1 – 5: AURA Board and Member Representatives Annual Meeting, Tucson, AZ

May 22 – 25: Infrastructure for Time Domain Science in the Era of LSST, Tucson, AZ

May 31 - June 2: Supernovae:  The LSST Revolution Workshop *, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

June 12 – 16: Getting Ready for Doing Science with LSST Data,* IN2P3 Computing Center, 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

November 7 – 9: AURA Workforce & Diversity Committee, La Serena, Chile