Introduction
With the summit still closed due to Covid restrictions, and, hence, construction still paused, the undoubted highlight of the past month within the Rubin community was the Project and Community Workshop (PCW), which attracted over 700 online participants; as detailed below, material is now available from the workshop sessions, including videos, as well as slide sets. A revised project schedule for the final stages of construction and for pre-operations remains to be announced, but it seems clear that Covid is likely to introduce a delay of something approaching a year to the start of survey operations.
One of the hot topics at the PCW was the potential impact on Rubin science of the constellations of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites due to be launched over the next few years by companies like SpaceX and OneWeb. This follows a workshop - SATCON1, the first in an intended series - at the end of June, organised by the AAS and NSF’s NOIRLab and bringing together astronomers and technical staff from the space industry to discuss how to quantify and mitigate the likely impact on ground-based optical and near-infrared astronomy. We present a brief summary below, along with links to the workshop report and presentation materials, which will be of interest to everyone reading this Newsletter.
Despite the delay to the construction schedule, work towards agreement of the international contributions to operations continues apace. With support from STFC/UKRI, LSST:UK is seeking a more substantial involvement in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time than was originally envisaged. Our Letter of Intent was well received, and many people are now working on expanding that into a full proposal by the submission deadline of September 25th. Approval for its contents will be sought from the LSST:UK Consortium Board, which acts as a proxy for the UK community in such matters. The proposal will be reviewed in the US in the autumn, with further iteration on its detailed content to follow in the New Year, with new data rights agreements due to be signed by 31 May 2021.
LSST:UK members are also currently preparing a second Rubin proposal, to host a Community Broker, which would guarantee access to one of the full alert streams to be produced by the near-real-time difference imaging pipeline. The UK’s prototype broker, Lasair, has been ingesting, and supporting analysis of, alerts from a Rubin precursor, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) for more than two years, and, in an item below, Andy Lawrence summarises some of the capabilities of Lasair and lessons learnt from running it on the ZTF alert stream.
Those with ideas for future newsletter items should contact the LSST:UK Project Managers (George Beckett and Terry Sloan: lusc_pm@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk), while everyone is encouraged to subscribe to the Rubin Observatory Digest for more general news from the US observatory team.
2020 Rubin Observatory Project and Community Workshop
The impact of satellite constellations on the Legacy Survey of Space and Time
Few astronomers can have missed images like that shown on the right of SpaceX Starlink satellites crossing the field of view of the Blanco telescope at CTIO soon after launch last November. Quantitative assessment of the impact of LEO satellite constellations has begun in earnest, with a particular focus on the Rubin Observatory, since the high etendue that make the Simonyi Survey Telescope so powerful for survey astronomy also make it vulnerable to the effects of LEO constellations, since, crudely, it covers the sky too quickly to make just dodging the satellites possible.
First results from these studies were presented at the end of June at a workshop - SATCON1 - organised by the AAS and NSF’s NOIRLab. A report from that workshop has now been published, along with technical appendices, while the workshop website also has copies of the presentations made by members of four working groups, covering observations, simulations, mitigations and metrics.
Starlink satellites imaged on 18 Nov 2019 from the Victor M. Blanco 4m Telescope at CTIO.
Image Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/DELVE
Lasair
Results of JA round
Recent LSST:UK outputs
LSST:UK has recently produced the following technical reports.
Title | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|
D2.5.1 Training resources for LSST:UK DAC users | Bob Mann, Stelios Voutsinas, Roy Williams | This document describes an initial release of documentation for users of current and future services accessed via the UK’s LSST Data Access Centre (DAC). This documentation release is necessarily limited in scope given that the UK DAC is still being developed. It comprises existing documentation for the Lasair alert broker and a very preliminary set of documentation for the LSST Science Platform (LSP). The LSP is the set of data services to be provided by the Rubin Observatory to support analysis of LSST data products. |