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LSST All Hands Meeting in Urbana, Illinois: Great Success in Team Building

Over 150 members of the LSST team descended on Urbana, Illinois from May 19th through May 23rd for the fourth annual All Hands Meeting. The meeting saw project management and science working group meetings, plenary sessions, breakout groups and the first inaugural East v. West soccer tournament.

Meetings for the Management Working Group, Science Council and Science Collaboration Teams all took place on Monday. The Management Working Group discussed preparations for the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) that the National Science Foundation requires as the project’s next major milestone. A project timeline is available on the web for team members. PDR will require a tremendous amount of preparation: the team will revisit the scientific mission and engineering design based on comments from the Conceptual Design Review in September 2007 and developments since the review.

The Science Council discussed publication of LSST science plans and results. The Council determined that a science book detailing a roadmap for research with the LSST would be an outstanding resource not only for the team members but for the scientific community at large both for planning purposes and for stimulating interest in the science possible with LSST. The “book” will be a living document that generates new ideas and dynamic collaborations and research plans. LSST will host a meeting to produce the roadmap along the lines of the workshop on Wide Field Survey Telescopes in 2001 at the Aspen Center for Physics or the Science with the LSST and Other Large Surveys in Seattle in 2004. The publication policy draft generated significant discussion—just as the technology is breaking new ground, the sharing and publication of data prompts new guidelines. The policy must be a framework, which can incorporate publication with non-public and public data, recognize different cultural needs of collaborators, establish review committees and encourage “LSSTC-certified” papers without constraining the open use, analysis and publication of data.

The Science Collaboration Meetings provided team members with the time to discuss why their science is important to pursue with LSST, what design and operational requirements are dictated by the science, and what flagship projects they want programmed. Each group discussed the current state of research and what the next steps were in determining specific design and operational needs as well as projects. Each Science Collaboration leader presented the outcomes of the discussions to the entire LSST team at the Plenary Session on Day Two. The Science Collaborations will expand efforts to determine what their science requires of the LSST hardware and software. Eventually all collaborations’ requirements will have to be considered against any others that might compete to determine exactly what LSST will provide.

The Plenary Sessions on Days Three and Four saw presentations on project status, observatory operations, data management, science, education and public outreach, camera, telescope, systems engineering, image simulations and calibration. Each presentation afforded the team members an increased understanding of their part and of how it relates to the whole.

Breakout sessions for specific functional areas focused on data management across areas. Breakout sessions included systems engineering, EPO and data management synergy, application algorithms, image simulation, data quality assurance, camera coordination, ground-based survey systematics and security. Discussions included challenges, risks and possible points of synergy.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the LSST institutional members, hosted the meeting. NSCA’s focus is on Petascale computing for science and engineering. Its Blue Waters Project is the next generation in cyber environments. The LSST information system is of interest because of the data management needs—the plan to reprocess the entire data set each year and the need to leverage external platforms such as Blue Waters. NSCA brings tremendous expertise and hardware to the LSST project.