LSST E-News |
Seasons Greetings and Best Wishes for 2009
This issue of LSST E-News completes our first year of publication. Highlights this quarter include progress on the primary and secondary mirrors fabrication, obtaining all environmental and building permits for construction of the LSST in Chile, acquisition of the 1.2-m Calypso telescope currently located at Kitt Peak near Tucson, and a scientific meeting hosted by the University of Washington to write an “LSST Science Book.”
Project Manager’s Corner
Don Sweeney
In November the LSST Corporation welcomed Vanderbilt University as the newest Institutional Member. Dr. Keivan Stassan will be the Vanderbilt Institutional Representative. The addition of Vanderbilt brings the total LSST membership to 27 with at least two additional applications pending before the Board. Read more
FOCUS ON… Science Collaboration Teams’ Meeting at Friday Harbor
Anna Spitz
Science collaboration team members gather at FHL to write the “LSST Science Book”
Representatives from the ten science collaborations met in Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, Washington from December 10th to December 15th to work on the “LSST Science Book” (working title). Zeljko Ivezic, Chair of Science Council, organized the meeting and kept all attendees on the straight and narrow. Read more
Corning Prepares to Fuse the LSST’s Secondary Mirror (M2) Substrate
Anna Spitz and William Gressler
M2 petals selected and machined
Corning Incorporated has successfully manufactured and selected all glass material and machined a test piece for a section of the LSST’s secondary mirror (M2) substrate. M2 will be the largest secondary convex mirror ever manufactured and polished. Its extensive size supports the stringent imaging requirements of LSST wide-field science, while permitting occupancy of the camera system within its central hole. Corning technicians are now working through the long, cold, dark, bleak winter in the upper reaches of New York State (Canton) and will continue through next year to produce the M2 annulus shaped substrate (inner hole diameter 1.8 meters and outer diameter 3.5 meters). Corning will complete the substrate in late 2009, and LSST will deliver the Corning substrate to an optical fabricator (not yet selected). Read more
Regional Authorities Approve LSST’s Environmental Declaration
Anna Spitz and Victor Krabbendam
COREMA approves LSST’s environmental declaration
Chile’s environmental commission of the Coquimbo IVth Region, Comisión Regional del Medio Ambiente (COREMA), completed its final review and approved the environmental declaration, Declaracion De Impacto Ambiental (DIA), that the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) prepared on behalf of LSST and submitted to the national environmental protection agency, Comisión Nacional del del Medio Ambiente (CONAMA). This approval effectively permits LSST to build and operate on Cerro Pachón. Read more
LSST Acquires 1.2-meter Calypso Telescope
Anna Spitz and Victor Krabbendam
Calypso telescope with enclosure rolled to observing position
The LSST project acquired the 1.2-meter Calypso Telescope from Edgar Smith in November. LSST will use the telescope in its current location on Kitt Peak to conduct unique scientific investigations in support of calibration plans and to prototype hardware and software components. In the future, LSST plans to move the telescope to Chile to use it for atmospheric monitoring. Read more
LSST Data Management Team a Finalist at SC08
Anna Spitz and Arun Jagatheesan
Loosely coupled infrastructure created for the SC08 challenge from distributed data centers.
The LSST Data Management (DM) team arrived as one of three finalists for the High Performance Computing (HPC) Storage Challenge (SC) at the 20th SC08 conference in Austin, Texas in November, and came home first runner-up out of a field of strong competitors! The SC Conference is the foremost international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis attended this year by more than 11,000 scientists, engineers, programmers, researchers, system administrators, managers and educators. The conference features the latest scientific and technical innovations from around the world and showcases demonstrations of how these innovations will enhance people’s abilities to understand information. In its first attempt at this prestigious competition, LSST placed second, winning a certificate of participation and an invitation to come back next year. LSST earned this distinction by demonstrating how the proposed data management infrastructure will manage anticipated data volumes along distributed pathways between the telescope, base facility, archival center and three data centers over the decade long survey lifetime. Read more
LSST is a public-private partnership. Funding for design and development activity comes from the National Science Foundation, private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSSTC Institutional Members:
Brookhaven National Laboratory; California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Chile; Columbia University; Google Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Johns Hopkins University; Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University; Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory; National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Princeton University; Purdue University; Research Corporation for Science Advancement; Rutgers University; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California, Davis; University of California, Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington; Vanderbilt University
LSST E-News is a free email publication of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project. It is for informational purposes only, and the information is subject to change without notice.
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