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LSST E-News

LSST E-News

June 2008  •  Volume 1 Number 2  •  Archive

PROJECT MANAGER’S CORNER

Don Sweeney, LSST Project Manager

L-R: Tony Tyson, Charles Simonyi, Roger Angel, Steven Beering, Don Sweeney, and Ian Shipsey stand in front of the SOML furnace at the high fire event.

LSST’s accomplishments in the first five months of 2008 were substantial. The M1/M3 mirror high fire was successful reaching a high temperature of approximately 1165°C (2125°F) over March 28th and 29th. The LSST mirror is now annealing and cooling gradually to room temperature in the slowly rotating oven of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. Technicians will remove it for grinding and polishing in mid-August. Competitive bidding for the secondary mirror contract is complete and a contract will be let this month.

Following the successful NSF Conceptual Design Review (CoDR) last September, the project has now moved on to preparation for the NSF Preliminary Design Review; the PDR is tentatively scheduled for February 2009. We will re-baseline the LSST budget to reflect 2008 dollars and adjust the scope to include Education and Public Outreach (EPO) activities. Project teams will validate the construction schedule, budget, and refine the design concepts presented at the CoDR.

A recent endorsement of the LSST by an important Department of Energy (DOE) committee called P5 has given us encouragement that the DOE will conduct their first major review of the LSST. The review will be a formal step toward sponsoring fabrication of the LSST camera. We are proposing this review, called Critical Decision-1, be held either in conjunction with the NSF PDR or soon thereafter.

Indications are that the LSST will be evaluated by the upcoming Decadal Survey. While the project welcomes this review, we are uncertain what impact, if any, this review will have on the LSST timeline. Also, it’s likely you have heard that the NSF is once again re-evaluating the funding process for the Major Research Equipment and Facility Construction (MREFC) projects. How the outcome of this evaluation will impact us is unknown. These two items, and things like them, are very important to our project timeline but mostly beyond our control. We’ll keep you informed.

 

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; Columbia University; Google, Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Johns Hopkins University; Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology - Stanford University; Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Princeton University; Purdue University; Research Corporation; Rutgers University; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California at Davis; University of California at Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington

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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