LSST E-News |
Building Community, Building LSST
Preparations are underway for the 4th LSST All Hands Meeting taking place north of Tucson, AZ, the week of of August 9, 2010.
LSST was designed from the outset both to engage and serve a broad community. Simulations have shown that a single data set can address scientific problems in areas of astronomy ranging from studies of small bodies in the solar system to uncovering the properties of dark matter and dark energy. All data obtained will be available with no proprietary period. Hundreds of people are currently contributing to the design and development phase of the project.
As we go to press with this 10th quarterly issue of LSST E-News, the LSST Project Office is hard at work planning events to bring this broad community together. We’re in the midst of preparing for an LSST All Hands Meeting, our 4th such meeting since 2005. This internal technical project review is open to all active participants from LSST subsystems and science collaboration teams. More than 200 people have registered, making this the largest All Hands Meeting so far. At the recent SPIE meeting on Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation in San Diego, which had 2000 attendees from around the world, LSST presented a total of 35 papers. From the exhibit hall to invited plenary talks, LSST had a very high profile. And three new Institutional Members have joined LSSTC since the last E-News: Texas A&M University, George Mason University, and the Adler Planetarium, bringing our total to 34 institutions.
As LSST moves closer to operations, the astronomical community is gearing up to take maximum advantage of the unprecedented opportunity it provides. We’ve just received word from the AAS that a Special Session titled Community Science with LSST will be held at the January 2011 meeting in Seattle. This session will give astronomers a preview of the available data products and interfaces as well as a description of the transformative science enabled by LSST. Science collaboration team members will share with the broad community their results of working with LSST tools and simulated data to plan their own science investigations in preparation for LSST. Leveraging off the high visibility of LSST at the AAS we have scheduled a team meeting on Sunday, January 9, 2011, at the University of Washington, a founding member of LSST.
Article written by S. Jacoby and S. Wolff
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:
Adler Planetarium; Brookhaven National Laboratory; California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Chile; Cornell University; Drexel University; George Mason University; Google Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Institut de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3); 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; Space Telescope Science Institute; Texas A&M University; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California, Davis; University of California, Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Michigan; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington; Vanderbilt University
LSST E-News Team:
- Suzanne Jacoby (Editor-in-Chief)
- Anna Spitz (Writer at Large)
- Mark Newhouse (Design & Production: Web)
- Emily Acosta (Design & Production: PDF/Print)
- Sidney Wolff (Editorial Consultant)
- Additional contributors as noted
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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