The Project Office welcomes you to the July 2009 issue of LSST E-News. The pace throughout LSST is intense and focused, with all our efforts directed toward moving along the path to funding and construction as described in the featured articles.

We draw your attention to another newsletter, a special edition of the Gemini Observatory newsletter which marks 400 Years of the Telescope by looking back at Gemini's history and its people. Included is Sidney Wolff, first director of Gemini and President of LSST Corporation.

Good Planning Leads to Informed Decisions

Suzanne Jacoby and Sidney Wolff

In these days of limited funds to pursue increasingly ambitious goals in scientific research, it is more important than ever to prioritize projects. And so the National Research Council (NRC) is again engaging the community in a review process to survey the field of space- and ground-based astronomy and astrophysics and recommend priorities that will influence funding decisions. Every ten years this Decadal Survey process unfolds, resulting in a concise report addressed to relevant funding agencies and read by Congressional committees with jurisdiction over those agencies, the scientific community, and the public. A high ranking in this survey is critical for projects seeking construction funding from the federal government in the next decade. The current decadal survey, Astro2010, is well into its mission of assessing activities in astronomy and astrophysics, including both new and previously identified concepts, and recommending priorities for the most important scientific and technical activities of the decade 2010-2020. LSST is participating fully in the process and made a presentation at the most recent meeting of the Optical and Infrared Prioritization Panel in Pasadena, CA. Read More...

From LSST Science Requirements to an Engineering Design

Don Sweeney and Chuck Claver

Right down to the nuts-and-bolts, how many millions of parts will there be in the LSST Observatory? We don’t really know nor does it actually matter. What does matter is our confidence that these parts come together as a system to perform the scientific mission of the LSST. This brief article introduces the way the LSST Systems Engineering Team is doing this job. Read More...

Phil Marshall—New Royal Society University Research Fellow

Anna H. Spitz

The LSST Science Collaboration Teams consist of more than 230 members. Here we profile Phil Marshall, chair of the strong lensing team, prompted by his being chosen as one of thirty University Research Fellows of the Royal Society, the national academy of science of the UK and the Commonwealth. This prestigious fellowship is a research-only position, which Phil plans to take up at Oxford University in 2010. Read More...

LSST-NCSA: A Partnership to Change the Way Science is Done

Anna H. Spitz

LSST is partnering with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to design large-scale computing, storage and networking infrastructure for the Data Management (DM) system. Since its opening in 1986, NCSA has made significant contributions to the growth of cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering. NCSA provides the design of infrastructure and middleware for LSST, and it will host the archive. The partnership of LSST and NCSA experts will make possible LSST’s ability to process the expected 15 terabytes of raw data and more than 100 terabytes of processed data each night. Read More...