Rubin Digest 19 October 2021

19 October 2021

Project & Science News

Rubin Observatory leadership showcased recent accomplishments and discussed upcoming plans at this year’s National Science Foundation (NSF)/Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Status Review, which was held virtually October 4-7. The review panel congratulated the Project on notable progress made despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and commended the team for providing a path to a new baseline and project completion. The panel also recognized Steve Kahn, who will be stepping down as Rubin Observatory Director in 2022, for his two decades of leadership and dedication to the Project. 

The Rubin Auxiliary Telescope (AuxTel) was driven with the feature based scheduler for the first time during an observing run on October 5-7. The feature based scheduler is an extremely flexible software application to produce observing sequencing strategies. This is the same application that will drive the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in the future, albeit with a considerably different configuration. The ability to execute sustained observations, automatically driven by the scheduler, represents a major achievement for the entire system because it requires a high level of stability and reliability for both hardware and software. The AuxTel team now plans to execute an imaging survey of a couple square degrees that will serve as a test case for the observatory operation.

A team from IN2P3 in France have recently been at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, working on the filter exchange system for the LSST Camera. Over the past few weeks they have reduced the time it takes to exchange one filter for another by ~50%. The filter exchange time is now slightly better than the 89 second camera goal; you can watch it in action in this YouTube video. The filter exchange system is the mechanism that allows the camera to take images in six different wavelength bands: u,g,r,i,z, and y.

Members of the Rubin Observatory Safety team on the summit recently escorted a crew from the popular Chilean television program Hijos de las Estrellas as they filmed on the Rubin construction site for an upcoming episode about dark matter. 

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

Corporation News

Reminder: the deadline for applications to the LSST Catalyst Fellowship program is November 15th. If you were unable to attend the October 8th “Ideas Lab” informational and networking session, you can access a summary and recordings from the event at this link.

Operations Updates

The first few months of Data Preview 0 (DP0), which launched on June 30th, have been successful, and everyone who applied to participate in DP0 earlier this year has now been invited to become a DP0 delegate—a total of nearly 300 people. The Operations team anticipates opening a second round of applications for new DP0 participants in early 2022, as originally planned. To learn more about DP0, see dp0-1.lsst.io, and to follow DP0 updates, search the DP0 tag on community.lsst.org.

Announcements & Opportunities:

Jennifer Adelman-McCarthy joined the pre-Operations Data Production team at Fermilab on October 1st. Jennifer will be a member of the Ops Processing Group and will be working on execution of processing campaigns, getting started with DP0.2.

The Rubin Observatory Community Engagement team (CET) welcomes Dr. Brian Nord into the role of Community Scientist for Citizen Science. Brian will work closely with both the Rubin Education and Public Outreach (EPO) team and the Rubin science community to guide the development of effective citizen science programs based on Rubin data. In this role, Brian will support scientists to set up, execute, and retrieve results from the Zooniverse framework, and help to ensure that citizen science programs enhance the scientific performance of Rubin Observatory.

Several new positions are available for Rubin Observatory Operations Scientists based at SLAC. Apply by November 15th to join the team of scientists and developers that investigates, maintains, and evolves the scientific software that will collect, process, and calibrate LSST data. Details and a link to apply are available in this job post. 

Info for Project Members

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

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

Upcoming Meetings with Rubin Observatory Involvement

(those with an asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2021
October 25-29	DESC Sprint Week, Virtual with in-person hubs at AstroParticule et Cosmologie (APC), France, Princeton University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
November 16-17	LSST Survey Strategy Workshop, Virtual
2022
January 9-13	239th AAS Winter Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT
January 11	Rubin Observatory Open House at AAS 239, Salt Lake City, UT

 

Upcoming Deadlines:

2021
November 15	LSSTC Catalyst Fellowship Application