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Named international participants may obtain data rights through contributions made on their behalf to Rubin LSST operations, which are estimated to cost ~$70M per year of survey operations. Groups of researchers in France and Brazil obtained data rights through in-kind contributions to development of the camera and network provision, respectively, but it was originally expected that all other international participants would obtain data rights through a subscription model. So, in 2015, STFC signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the LSST Corporation to secure data rights for 100 Affiliate PIs (i.e. faculty) and 400 Junior Associates (i.e postdocs and PhD students) from the UK community.
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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 funded 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 (and 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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