UK in-kind proposal: summary and status

Background

The Rubin LSST is a billion-dollar project. The bulk of the cost of construction is being met by the US funding agencies ($437M from the NSF and $168M from the DOE), as a result of which all professional astronomers in the US have the right to access proprietary Rubin LSST data, as do those from the host country, Chile.

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.

In 2019, the US funding agencies decided that all international contributions should all be made in-kind. These could either offset the US agencies costs (by undertaking operations work that would otherwise happen in the US) or add value to the US community’s exploitation of the Rubin LSST dataset through enhancing the range of user-generated products. Potential international participants submitted in-kind proposals in the autumn of 2020, and they are currently under review, with the expectation that data rights agreements resulting from them will be signed by late summer 2021.

The UK in-kind package

The shift to the in-kind contribution model presented the UK with a great opportunity, due to the community’s strength in survey astronomy. This would enable us to make significant value-adding contributions (both of complementary data and of effort to develop software to produce user-generated products), while Rubin management invited us to make specific cost-offsetting contributions, in recognition of particular expertise within the community. With support from STFC, we developed an ambitious in-kind proposal, with two top-level goals:

1. To extend UK data rights to encompass the whole community (suitably defined); and

2. To secure the UK a place in the Rubin LSST operations consortium.

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:

Several points are worth highlighting from this table:

• 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.

Status

The proposed set of contributions outlined above has been recommended by Rubin management for consideration by the US funding agencies. This proposal was endorsed by STFC, but the necessary funds have not all yet been secured. The next steps are for the US and UK agencies to reach an agreement on the composition of the UK in-kind package, after which data rights agreements can be signed. This is expected to happen before the end of 2021.