Introduction
Trailed verbally at the LSST@Europe5 conference, but now confirmed by a Community post, a revision to the Rubin construction schedule has been necessitated by two recent problems. Firstly, some work within the telescope dome is being delayed while the dome crane is being repaired, while the shipping of LSSTCam from SLAC to Chile is on hold, following the discovery of a small leak in its cryostat. The latter is the more serious, as it will delay the arrival of the camera on the summit by at least four months - and, possibly, significantly longer, if it proves necessary to disassemble the camera to fix the leak - and this may have a knock-on effect for how commissioning observations are undertaken. A final decision will be taken in February 2024, but it may now make more sense to begin the programme of on-sky commissioning observations with ComCam, the commissioning camera, rather than awaiting the delayed arrival of LSSTCam.
In better news, an article has been published on the rubinobservatory.org website detailing how the “Rubin Observatory will help unravel mysteries of dark matter and dark energy”. This is the second such “science release”, in which the scientific expectations from the Rubin LSST are outlined for a general audience.
Finally, a reminder that, as mentioned in last month’s Newsletter, we are looking for someone interested in the use of AI/machine learning in LSST science to act as a liaison between LSST:UK and the Alan Turing Institute’s Space Science Interest Group. Please email Stephen Smartt and myself if you are interested in that role: this won’t be an onerous position, and might suit someone at any career stage - we’re just looking for someone interested in applying AI/ML techniques to LSST data who can help us ensure that LSST is well represented within this SIG.
Those with ideas for future newsletter items should contact the LSST:UK Project Managers (George Beckett and Terry Sloanlusc_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.
LSST@Europe5
The LSST@Europe5 conference took place in Porec, on the coast of the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia during the week of 25-29 September, attracting a very good turnout from across Europe and beyond, including many key Rubin staff. Slides from the talks are now appearing linked from the conference programme page - click on a session for a listing of talks within it - while recordings will be made available through a dedicated YouTube channel.
As in previous LSST@Europe conferences, there was a very strong showing from the UK. This included several talks in the in-kind contributions sessions (from Aprajita Verma, Bob Mann, George Beckett and Roy Williams), as well as in those organised by various Science Collaborations: AGN (Brian Bichang’a); Dark Energy (Nisha Grewal); Galaxies (Aaron Watkins, Ilin Lazar, Sugata Kaviraj); Solar System (Steph Merritt); Strong Lensing (Aprajita Verma, Dan Ryczanowski, Graham Smith, Suhail Dhawan); and Transient and Variable Stars (Christopher Frohmaier, Ken Smith. Tom J Wilson and Rokas Zemaitis spoke at a session jointly organised by the Stars, Milky Way and Local Volume SC and the Transients and Variable Stars SC, while Christopher Frohmaier and Nicholas Walton gave talks in the session on synergies with other surveys, and Nicholas Walton led a session planning a COST Action to support LSST science in Europe.
Dummy heading for Dan
New LUSC Team members
The past month has seen the onboarding of an unusual number of new members of the LSST:UK Science Centre (LUSC) team: some are new to the LSST community; others have been involved scientifically before, but are now starting to contribute to one of the UK’s in-kind contributions; and some have been contributing to Rubin construction for many years, but are only now moving into the reporting framework for UK contributions.
Behnood Bandi is a doctoral researcher working under the supervision of Jon Loveday at the University of Sussex and studying galaxy clustering for 4MOST and in LSST. Behnood already holds LSST data rights, as an LSST:UK Junior Associate, and is thrilled to be contributing to LSST commissioning, through performing angular clustering analysis of commissioning data.
Farrukh Azfar is a Lecturer in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and a long-time member of the LSST Camera team, earning Builder status for his work on the Camera Control Software. Farrukh is interested in multi-messenger physics and also work on SNEWS (Super Nova Early Warning System), which will use the arriving neutrinos from a core-collapse supernova to point to the location of the supernova for timely detection of its optical component.
James Robinson is a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, researching asteroids and comets in the Solar System. Jamie is particularly interested in determining the physical properties of these small bodies from photometric observations in order to constrain their size, shape, composition and spin state or the presence of activity. Jamie is excited to be developing analysis tools for the Adler platform which will work alongside Lasair to extract this information for the vast number of small bodies that will be characterised by LSST
William Lucas works at EPCC in Edinburgh as an HPC Applications Consultant. A lot of his time in the past few years has been spent working as computational science and engineering (CSE) support on the ARCHER2 UK national supercomputing service and HPC-Europa3, and also organising and lecturing the numerical algorithms course on EPCC’s MSc. William’s background is in astrophysics - on the computational side of star formation - and is very happy to be returning to the field. He will be working on WP 3.8.3 (S8), taking over from James Perry’s work and in the short term at least looking to port more of the imSim pipeline with GalSim and batoid to run on GPU using OpenMP.
(Elham Saremi , Dave McKay , Cyrielle Opitom , Jeff Tseng , gavindalton , Thomas Cornish)
Terry Sloan and Bob Mann
Recent LSST:UK Science Centre outputs
The LSST:UK Science Centre has recently produced the following technical reports.
Title | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|
Forthcoming meetings of interest
Things are relatively quiet, meeting-wise, over the next month or so. However there are still several upcoming meeting, which may be of interest, plus some provisional dates for your diary in early 2024:
Dates | Meeting Title/ Event | Meeting Website/ Contact | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
12/Mar/24—15/Mar/24 | Preparing for the Statistical Age of Strong Gravitational Lens Science with the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) | Pre-registration will open in October (meeting dates are tbc). More information available from Aprajita Verma . | Oxford, UK |
22/Jan/24 - 26/Jan/24 | What was that? - planning ESO follow up for transients, variables and solar system objects in the era of LSST | ||
11/Dec/23—15/Dec/23 | Unveiling the Dynamic Universe: Cosmic Streams in the Era of Rubin | Puerto Varas, Chile |
Members of the Consortium (not in receipt of travel funding through one of the Science Centre grants) may apply for travel support for meetings of this kind via the the LSST:UK Pool Travel Fund. Details are available at Forthcoming LSST-related Meetings .
Note that the current list of forthcoming meeting is always available on the Relevant Meetings page. You may also wish to check information held on the LSST organisation website LSST-organised events and the LSST Corporation website.
Announcements
If you have significant announcements that are directly relevant to LSST:UK and would like to share the announcement in a future newsletter, please contact the LSST:UK project managers.