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.

For scientists and educators late in the next decade, LSST promises to be many things: a deep color image of the entire sky visible from Chile that becomes more detailed with time, a stream of messages that signal new “bumps in the night” to investigate, a massive database for exploring the nature of dark energy and dark matter. It falls upon the multi-continent OWG team to deliver the data to fulfill these promises.

Part of the team will be based in La Serena, Chile and given responsibility for maintaining and operating the telescope and camera facility on Cerro Pachón as well as a nearby, major data center at sea-level. Another major operations group will be based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana-Champaign, Ill. Teams of scientists at both locations will monitor information quality and help the worldwide research community use the LSST information stream effectively. The education and public outreach (EPO) team will relay developments to the public while coordinating education activities growing out of the data. The project director will conduct the entire LSST symphony with oversight and guidance from a management board and a science council.

Operating and maintaining technologically advanced facilities at high altitude in remote locations is only part of the LSST operations challenge. LSST must manage large data flows and process the data quickly at multiple world-class data centers separated by continental distances. For these tasks, Dave and his team draw on the experience of other large survey projects such as 2MASS and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Currently, the group is collating preliminary LSST operations concepts and budget estimates into a more complete operations plan. The next step is to identify and fill in missing parts. Using that more complete plan, existing cost estimates will be validated and revised as necessary. The OWG plans to deliver a more complete plan with validated operations costs at the Preliminary Design Review, scheduled in 2010.

Dave Silva contributed to this article.