The past month has seen two major construction milestones. Both were the subject of Rubin press releases, so many people will have seen them already, but their significance warrants mentioning them again here. The first was the coating of the primary/tertiary mirror blank to create the beautiful mirror shown to the right: there is also a video on YouTube, which shows the process in more detail. The second, described in more detail by Eleanor O'Kane below, was the arrival of LSSTCam on Cerro Pachón (see bottom right). The safe arrival of the camera is, of course, a major milestone in itself, but it also marks the removal of the main source of uncertainty in the timeline to the start of survey operations: for some time, events in the final stages of Rubin construction have been expressed w.r.t. to the shipping of LSSTCam, so the next revision of the plan for the early science programme should contain more precise dates for events up to Data Release 1.

The Observatory has recently published a new survey strategy website. Its initial role is primarily to gather together resources relating to the optimisation of the survey strategy - e.g., a summary of the activities of the Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC) and links to the simulations that have underpinned them - but, once operations start, it will also publish survey progress reports.

The LSST Discovery Alliance is currently running another of its calls for funding through its LINCC Incubators programme. This programme “will support teams of researchers to test, apply, or expand early-stage analysis software being developed as a part of LINCC Frameworks using their own exciting scientific investigations with existing surveys or simulated data” and counted Meg Schwamb and Tom J Wilson amongst its first four awardees: they were supported, respectively, to optimise the LSST Solar System Simulator and to incorporate into the LINCC Framework the cross-matching software being developed as one of the UK’s in-kind contributions. The deadline for brief stage-one proposals is 11:59 pm Pacific time on Monday, 17 June.

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