• 1 Introduction
• 2 Commissioning update
• 3 UK participation in CASTOR, and synergies with Rubin
• 4 Recent LSST:UK Science Centre outputs
• 5 Forthcoming meetings of interest
• 6 Announcements

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Introduction

It’s conference season and, as @George Beckett notes below, there are a number of LSST:UK-related meetings in the next few months. The first of those is the National Astronomy Meeting at Warwick, which includes parallel sessions on Preparing for the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time on the Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, plus a talk on LSST:UK computing in the Discovery in Astronomy and Space Physics enabled by large-scale Digital Research Infrastructures (ASTROCOMP) session on the Monday morning.

Registration is also open (and will close on July 22nd) for both in-person and remote attendance of the 2022 Project and Community Workshop taking place in Tucson on August 8-12.

Finally, pre-registration is open for the LSST@Europe4 meeting, which we held in Rome on October 24-28. In-person attendance is limited to 100 people, so those wishing to attend in person should pre-register soon.

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.

Commissioning update

We have now received formal confirmation that the LSST:UK contributions to Rubin commissioning have been accepted by the System Integration Test and Commissioning (SITCom) team. SITCom are the recipient group for our contributions within the International In-kind programme. We will be working with SITCom leadership to on-board UK team members and define the details of our contributions in the coming months. This will lead to us working within a fully integrated and enlarged SITCom team spanning existing SITCom members plus new members from the International In-kind and US/Chile communities. LSST:UK SITCom members are as follows: Manda Banerji (Southampton), Chris Collins (LJMU), Gavin Dalton (Oxford/RALSpace), Anais Gonneau (CASU), Carlos Gonzalez-Fernandez (CASU), Sugata Kaviraj (Hertfordshire), Jon Loveday (Sussex), Richard McMahon (IoA), Tim Naylor (Exeter), Dan Ryczanowski (Birmingham), Raphael Shirley (Southampton), Graham Smith (Birmingham), Leigh Smith (CASU), Will Sutherland (QMUL), Nic Walton (CASU), Aaron Watkins (Hertfordshire), Tom Wilson (Exeter). All going well, our contributions will mainly occur during 2023 as ComCam and LSSTCam get on sky for the first time. During this time I aim to keep the LSST:UK community updated via the monthly newsletter, and colleagues are always welcome to email me (gps@star.sr.bham.ac.uk) with specific questions.

UK participation in CASTOR, and synergies with Rubin

CASTOR is a Canadian-led concept for a 1m space telescope that will provide panoramic, near-diffraction-limited imaging and spectroscopy in the ultraviolet (UV) and blue-optical (150-550 nm). The main capabilities and observing modes are summarised in Fig. 1. With a planned launch in the early 2030s, there is worldwide consensus that such a mission is necessary to bridge the gap in UV astronomy between Hubble and the next generation UV/O/IR observatory, while also having enormous synergies with Rubin and Euclid. With a nominal lifetime of 5 yr (10 yr goal) CASTOR’s Primary Survey will provide deep UV/u/g imaging (see Fig. 2) of the overlap region (~7700 deg²) between Rubin-WFD and Euclid-Wide, including the Roman HSL. Additionally, 30% of the observing time is expected to be allocated to GO programmes.

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Figure 1. Summary of CASTOR capabilities and proposed observing modes.

An 18-month Phase 0 study started in 2022, and will cover scientific, technological, and programmatic aspects. UK researchers are currently involved in the scientific definition of the mission through participation in the different Science Working Groups, namely Time domain astrophysics, Cosmology, AGN physics, Galaxies and cosmic star formation, Near-field cosmology, Stellar astrophysics, Extrasolar planets and Solar System science.

The recent announcement that the UK Space Agency will soon be introducing a new programme for bilateral collaborations outside of ESA represents a real opportunity for the UK to join the mission. Given the strong synergies with Rubin, we are looking for LSST:UK scientists interested in identifying key scientific questions that would strongly benefit from the combination of the two datasets, as well as opportunities to contribute analysis and simulation tools to advance the science readiness of the mission.

Please email me (ruben.sanchez-janssen@stfc.ac.uk) if you’re interested in contributing to this exciting opportunity or would like more details.

Recent LSST:UK Science Centre outputs

The LSST:UK Science Centre has recently produced the following technical reports.

Forthcoming meetings of interest

Several meetings of potential interest have been scheduled for the coming months:

• 25–29 October 2022 -- Rubin Observatory LSST@Europe4, at Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, Italy. The will be a hybrid meeting with a limited number of in-person spaces. Pre-registration is open now and those who wish to attend in-person are encouraged to complete pre-registration as soon as possible.

• 17–22 October 2022 – DESC Sprint Week, at University of Michigen, Ann Arbor. Details to be published on DESC members website (login required).

• 8-12 August 2022 – 2022 Project and Community Workshop, Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain Resort, Tucson. This is primarily an in-person event, though some sessions (plenaries and general-interest sessions) will be virtually accessible for those who cannot attend in person.

• 1–5 August 2022 – the next DESC Collaboration Meeting will be held during 1st–5th August at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

• 25--29 July 2022 – Boom! A workshop on explosive transients with LSST is being hosted at University of Urbana-Chapaign, Urbana, in the week preceding the DESC Collaboration Meeting, to allow people to attend both meetings and reduce their overall travel costs.

• 11–15 July 2022 – National Astronomy Meeting is being held at Warwick University. In particular, two parallel sessions may be of interest: Preparing for the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time organised by LSST:UK; and Discovery in Astronomy and Space Physics enabled by large-scale Digital Research Infrastructures (ASTROCOMP) organised by the IRIS programme.

• Those involved in the Rubin Data Delegates' Program are reminded that the first DP0.2 Delegate Assembly. will be held on Friday 8th July at 9am PT/ 5pm BST. More details have been posted on the Community Forum.

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 https://lsst-uk.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/HOME/pages/25853997/LSST+UK+Pool+Travel+Fund .

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.