Blogs

June 17, 2019 - The team working on the Auxiliary Telescope for LSST had a big reason to celebrate this week, after completing a series of exercises on Cerro Pachón that demonstrated the successful integration of the telescope's software and hardware systems. The AuxTel (as it's fondly known) is located on a hill about 100 meters (328 feet) from the main LSST telescope, and it will measure atmospheric transmission during LSST Operations.

The LSST Vertical Platform Lift Completes Load Testing on the Summit

June 4, 2019 - When it comes to moving enormous pieces of LSST equipment between floors of the summit facility building, an ordinary cargo elevator just won't do. Instead, a heavy-duty, vertical platform lift will carry the assembled mirror and camera subsystems 78-feet (23.8 meters) between the telescope and maintenance floors of the LSST observatory. The heaviest load to raise and lower will be the combined weight of the Primary Tertiary Mirror (M1M3), mirror cell, transport cart—close to 80 tons (72.5 metric tons)!

May 22, 2019 - LSST's U.S. public funding agencies, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), have reached a final decision on the way data rights and data access will be handled during LSST Operations.

We are working with AURA, SLAC, and NSF/DOE to understand the new model and will be communicating to you in the next weeks on what this means for the project and operations teams and our LSST stakeholders. We plan to keep you closely informed.

Servers already installed in the new computer room

May 3, 2019 - CC-IN2P3 is one of the computing facilities that will be responsible for processing and storing data collected by LSST during Operations. The campaign to upgrade the center’s power and cooling infrastructure in preparation to host LSST data has entered its final phase. Located in Lyon, France, CC-IN2P3 has two computer rooms of 850 m2 each (9,150 ft2) hosting about 18,000 CPU cores, 28 PB of disk storage, and four automated tape libraries where 63 PB of data are stored. These resources are routinely used by several scientific projects, 24/7.

April 9, 2019 - The 8.4-meter LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) set sail from Houston, Texas, on Friday, April 5th! Along with some other LSST cargo, the M1M3 is securely stowed aboard the BBC Manitoba for an ocean voyage to Coquimbo, Chile; the trip is expected to take about five weeks. You can track the progress of the ship by entering the vessel's name in the search bar at this website.  

March 5, 2019 - The object in this photo, called the calibration screen reflector, was manufactured in the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) instrument shop, which is located in the same building as the LSST Project Office in Tucson, Arizona. Our talented instrumentation team has been working on this piece of equipment for many months, and it shows! The reflector will be an important component of the calibration system inside the dome of LSST; this system is designed to determine how real-world factors like dust, and evolution to the sensitivity of the equipment over time, affect the images taken by the LSST Camera.

February 8, 2019 - The challenge to viewing and imaging celestial objects from the Earth’s surface is that the Earth’s atmosphere distorts light from space. When you look up at the stars and see them twinkle, you’re experiencing this phenomenon; light from stars is (generally) constant, but the light that reaches your eyes has been pushed around by turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere. That turbulence is caused by the interaction of varying temperature and density layers between the Earth’s surface and space. Twinkling stars might be pretty to look at, but they’re pretty annoying for scientists who want a crisp, clear view of the objects they’re studying.