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In common with other potential international participants, this proposal has been through a multi-stage process since late 2019, resulting in a final version that is available from the Science Working Group space on the LSST:UK wiki (requires login credentials). This strategy was developed by the LSST:UK Executive and was fully supported by the LSST:UK Consortium Board.
The proposal comprises fifteen separate contributions, each of which is judged as earning a certain number of PI slots (and associated Junior Associate slots) according to a prescription in the Rubin In-Kind Contribution Program Handbook for Proposal Teams. These are summarised below:
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The total number of PI slots gained significant exceeds the number of UK faculty expected to have a serious interest in Rubin LSST data, thereby justifying the requested extension of data rights to the whole UK community.
Approximately half of the PI slots (~1/2 of item 1 and all of item 3) would be earned by contributions of computational resources through the IRIS initiative, and, hence, not staff effort through the STFC astronomy budget.
Most of the software development effort work was already underway or planned as part of the STFC-funded LSST:UK Science Centre (LUSC) programme: items 3-9 are part of LUSC Phase B; items 10 and 11 reinstate part of the original Phase B programme which could not be funded through PPRP, and item 12 comprises part of the plans for LUSC Phases C and D.
Item 4, the Lasair alert broker, earns no PI slots itself, because it comprises the UK’s candidate Community Broker (for which development effort was already to be contributedand Rubin specifically want these dealt with separately, outside the In-Kind process), but it is necessary for item 10, which takes information from, and returns it to, Lasair. Rubin approved this process of including Item 4 as part of the UK package, in this manner.
The Rubin Observatory invited us to propose items 1,2, 13-15, all of which would help bind us into the operations consortium.
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