Introduction
Construction milestones continue to be met on the summit of Cerro Pachón. The image on the right shows the successful outcome of the installation of the Top-End Assembly (TEA).
The Rubin Observatory has released a video on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOaS8jzkTMI - following the TEA installation, accompanied by suitably stirring music.
The Telescope Mount Assembly now just needs to have the camera mass surrogate installed and it will be complete, allowing a variety of tests before the eventual arrival of the camera itself.
(Credit: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA)
Meanwhile, a milestone was reached in the camera construction, with the arrival at SLAC of the first filter, that for the r band (pictured right).
Each filter is almost 80cm in diameter and weighs about 40kg. Before arrival at SLAC for eventual integration into the camera, the filters each undergo a journey that takes them to France for the shaping and polishing of the substrate, followed by coating and installation in their individual frames at different locations in the US.
The remaining five filters - for the u, g, i, z and y bands - are due to arrive in SLAC in the next few months, after which all six will be loaded into the filter exchanger by the end of 2021. The camera is due to be shipped to Chile early in 2022.
(Credit: Travis Lange/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
Finally, the Observatory has released another YouTube video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41_VUIPwWAk - that summarises a decade of construction on Cerro Pachón in 80 seconds, to the accompaniment of a rather jauntier ditty than that chosen for the TEA installation video.
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:UK All-Hands Meeting
The 2021 LSST:UK All-Hands Meeting will take place on on 11-13 May, with roughly two days' worth of sessions distributed across the three days, to help prevent Zoom-fatigue. Organising committees are now being set up, and they will issue a call for contributions soon, but the intention is to supplement more formal presentations with use of a tool like Gather to try and recreate online some of the more social aspects of a real conference. So, please mark those dates in your calendars, and watch out for further announcements on the lusc-announce email list.
2021 Mid-Year Junior Associates Selection Round
Update on the UK in-kind package
In the December/January newsletter, I reported that the full UK in-kind proposal had been submitted in November 2020. This was then reviewed by Rubin Observatory staff and by the Contribution Evaluation Committee, leading to the release of a feedback document on March 3rd. That feedback was very positive: of the fifteen individual contributions proposed for our in-kind package in November, six were “Accepted” and the remaining nine were “Accepted with modifications”, where the requested modifications were minor clarifications or corrections. An updated proposal, revised in the light of the feedback comments, was resubmitted on March 19th; it, and the feedback document, can be found linked from the Science Working Group home page on the wiki.
The Rubin staff are currently working their way through all the revised proposals submitted by all the #######
IRIS
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Recent LSST:UK outputs
LSST:UK has recently produced the following technical reports.