LSST E-News

The Project Office welcomes you to the January 2010 issue of E-News! You’ll find the latest news about the M1/M3 and M2 mirror production as well as the second installment of our series featuring chapters of the Science Book. This issue it’s Chapter 5: The Solar System. Printed copies of the Science Book have been distributed to authors and various VIPs; the book is also available for download at www.lsst.org/lsst/scibook.

Expect a strong showing from LSST at the January 2010 AAS Meeting in Washington, DC. We’ll have our booth on the exhibit floor, 25 posters on display on Monday, January 4th, and a special Splinter Meeting on Sunday the 3rd organized by Michael Strauss, Chair of the Science Collaborations, with about 100 LSST collaborators in attendance. Results of the second call to the general US community to apply to join LSST Science Collaborations were just announced, and so we welcome 30 new members to 7 existing collaborations, and one entirely new collaboration on Informatics and Statistics, chaired by Kirk Borne.

We’re keeping busy with an NSF Reverse Site Visit mid-December to review project progress as we prepare for the LSST Final Design Phase which precedes construction start.

Finally we draw your attention to a podcast in which Sidney Wolff talked with Suzanne Jacoby about LSST as part of the award-winning series “365 Days of Astronomy”, a daily podcast for the International Year of Astronomy. Clear 8.5 minutes from your schedule and listen here: http://365daysofastronomy.org/.

LSST’S M1/M3 MIRROR SET FOR GENERATION AND POLISHING

Steward Observatory’s Mirror Lab (SOML) team performed the LSST primary/tertiary (M1/M3) mirror’s final rotation and integration with its polishing cell in November, and has since moved the 8.4-meter mirror to the Large Optical Generator to begin generation and polishing of the M1/M3 surfaces. SOML technicians will remove an excess of 234-mm of glass over the M3 surface—equal to 2.3 cubic meters or 11,000 pounds of material—using fixed abrasive wheels and then ever more delicate loose abrasive polishing with stress lap tools until they produce the specified mirror figure. Read More...

LYNNE JONES—LSST PERFORMANCE SCIENTIST AND A WHOLE LOT MORE

Lynne Jones seems to run at work and at play—both at high speed and for the long run. As LSST Performance Scientist she integrates the Operations Simulation, Calibration Simulation, and Image Simulation groups, making sure that the science concerns from the science collaborations are being addressed and that their outputs are available for the collaborations. She also does stand-alone evaluations of things such as filter bandpasses and is involved with implementing the Moving Object Pipeline. She has found time to co-lead The Solar System and The Transient and Variable Universe chapters of the LSST Science Book as well as contribute to two other chapters. In addition to the LSST work, Lynne collaborates with colleagues in Canada, France, and the US on the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS), which was part of the CFHT Legacy Survey, works with Andy Becker on Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) and is figuring out ways to apply the new many-core (GPU) technology to planetary astronomy problems. And she finished the 5K Torchlight Run in Seattle in just under 36 minutes. Read More…

LSST M2 SUBSTRATE COMPLETE AND SHIPPED

On a crisp, sunny November morning, the 31,000-pound, 13-foot wide LSST secondary mirror (M2) container rolled out of Corning’s Canton, New York facility, two-months ahead of schedule, and began its journey to Cambridge, Massachusetts on a 45-foot long air ride trailer. The wide load successfully negotiated the narrow rural roads and occasional horse buggy on its way through Vermont and into Massachusetts where the load switched to a different cab to minimize wheelbase in order to fit down the loading ramp at Harvard University. This LSST partner institution provided a 40-ton gantry crane sufficient for off-loading the precious cargo, a generous 14-foot wide receiving ramp (did we mention the 13-foot wide container?) and ample storage space to accommodate our mirror blank. Read More…

THE SOLAR SYSTEM: SMALL BODIES, BIG CONSEQUENCES

LSST will bring “close-to-home” objects into focus as no other telescope has. Whether searching for asteroids that might one day collide with the Earth, or finding new information about planet formation and evolution, LSST will provide users with unparalleled access to the millions of small objects that lie within our own Solar System—remnants of the primordial solar nebula that allow us to decipher its early history. Read More…

LOOKING AHEAD TO LSST OPERATIONS

Dave Silva now leads the LSST Operations Working Group (OWG)—a team working across LSST sub-systems and two (or more!) continents. With his deputy, Bob Blum, Dave has begun to assemble group members, collect information, formulate an operations strategy, and evaluate the costs associated with LSST operations. Dave brings extensive observatory operations experience from NOAO and ESO to this project. He has worked with cross-project teams to develop operations plans for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). Delivering all the information that LSST will generate is a large, complex, and challenging task. Read More…