Telescope & Site

Telescope & Site Management Team

Victor Krabbendam

Project Manager, National Optical Astronomy Observatories

Chuck Claver

Project Scientist, National Optical Astronomy Observatories

The telescope and site subsystem includes the Telescope as well as the buildings and facilities on the summit and at the base to support both operations and maintenance of the LSST. The telescope is the light collecting module that supports the optical system and camera assembly and positions them to acquire and track fields in the sky to demanding precision. The telescope has active position control for these critical elements as well as systems to mitigate the impact of natural operating conditions on the image collection process. These systems include light baffling, wind protection, and thermal controls with natural ventilation and daytime cooling. The LSST telescope and facility is designed to be highly robotic with minimum human intervention. During operations the observation control originates from a sophisticated LSST observatory scheduler, a scientific monitor engaged in real time at any remote operation center, and an operator on the summit. There will be a limited summit staff to ensure safe operation and to troubleshoot as required.

The Telescope and Site team is based at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), a LSST partner institution, in Tucson Arizona. This team works closely with the LSST Project Office to establish an integrated management and system engineering approach to the LSST Project. The Telescope and Site team also works closely with its partner instructions, mainly the University of Arizona, and Lawrence Livermore National Labs which both have groups working on critical elements of the telescope system.

Detailed information on the Telescope and Site can be found in the pages below.