lsstpo's blog

August 18, 2020 - Rubin Observatory's very first all-virtual Project and Community Workshop (PCW) took place August 10-14, 2020, and it was a resounding success. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the first in-person PCW (then referred to as an all-hands meeting), which was held at the Dove Mountain resort in Tucson, AZ in 2010. That's the year—the week, in fact—that LSST was announced as the #1 priority in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, and the 2010 meeting attendees celebrated the occasion with a champagne toast. The Rubin 2020 PCW might have been a bit short on champagne, but it was by far the most well-attended meeting to date, with more than 700 people registered, representing nearly every time-zone in the world!

August 12, 2020 - Working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic isn't slowing down the Rubin Observatory Education and Public Outreach (EPO) team as they continue to develop the Rubin EPO program, which includes a variety of interactive, online experiences. But adjustments have still been necessary; the team was in the midst of a user-testing campaign for its formal education materials—a suite of "Investigations" for teachers of advanced middle-school through college students, and related support materials—when in-person events started to be canceled.

Project Members Learn How to Use Rubin's Engineering and Facility Database

May 5, 2020 - The Rubin Observatory Commissioning Camera (ComCam) shipped from Tucson, AZ, on March 16th and arrived safely in Chile in early April. Because of the summit construction shutdown (due to safety concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic), the ComCam team set up an instrument lab at the AURA Base Facility in La Serena in order to confirm that ComCam had arrived undamaged. There was some extra space in the Base Facility Data Center server room for the temporary lab—this solution ensured plenty of isolated space for working, but also made network connectivity to the ComCam and other observatory servers relatively straightforward.

April 30, 2020 -  On April 22nd, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced to the Rubin Operations team that DOE, in coordination with the National Science Foundation (NSF), will put out a Financial Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for the US Data Facility (USDF) for Rubin Operations. During operations, the USDF will operate and maintain the systems which are being developed during construction to produce and provide Rubin Observatory scientific data products to its community.

The FOA process would:

April 24, 2020 - It's been just over a month since construction on Rubin Observatory stopped because of concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic, and although we don't have a definite date when activities can resume, the Project team is busy making plans for how that can safely happen when it's time. In the meantime, since the shutdown began we've been sending small teams (using all the appropriate precautions and safety measures) to Cerro Pachón about every two weeks to inspect the facilities and equipment on the summit and perform necessary maintenance tasks. The workers travel to the summit in individual vehicles, and only those whose expertise is essential to completing that day's list of pre-arranged tasks make the trip.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a significant impact on Rubin Observatory construction activities. As a preventative measure, construction activities on Cerro Pachón were shut down on Friday, March 20th, and the site was secured as safely as possible given the incomplete condition of the facility. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory also closed, and work on the Camera has ceased.

All Rubin Observatory staff are now teleworking, and progress is being made in software development and a number of other areas. When safety permits, staff will be able to return to the summit and construction will ramp up as quickly as is feasible. Project leadership will work with our funding agencies, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), to evaluate the impact on the construction timeline.

Answers to frequently asked questions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Rubin Observatory, as well as the latest updates to this evolving situation, are available here.

Informal joint public statement.

We are pleased to share with you some news on the interaction between Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Euclid Consortium. We believe, and hope you will agree, that both the Rubin Observatory and Euclid science communities would benefit from the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and Euclid datasets being jointly processed to produce shared “derived data products” (DDPs). To make progress towards this goal we are establishing a joint DDP working group, the DDP-WG, that will recommend a science-driven initial set of DDPs which would be shared promptly and simultaneously with both the Euclid Consortium and all Rubin Observatory LSST data rights holders for scientific use, in a way that protects the unique science of each collaboration and respects the data policies of each collaboration. We expect the DDP-WG will take broad input from both science communities in establishing the recommended DDPs.

While the DDP-WG will not be the group that will decide who makes the DDPs, where they are made, how they are made, or what funding mechanism will pay for that effort, the idea is that this initial set of DDPs, if approved, would form the basis of a Letter of Intent signed by both Rubin Observatory and Euclid leadership to actually create those DDPs. The DDP-WG would then remain a science-focused, standing committee that would recommend further DDPs as both the Euclid and LSST surveys progress.

Given the data and publication policies of both Rubin Observatory and the Euclid Consortium, a collaborative agreement between the two groups is the only way that such joint derived data products can be made and then shared back to either of the two groups for publication during the respective proprietary periods. There is still much work to be done to find a set of DDPs that are mutually and equally beneficial to both communities - but we are confident we can set up a DDP-WG to succeed at this task.

Our next steps are to appoint and charge this working group; we have in mind asking it to hold a virtual workshop within the next 6 months in order to help collect the input it will need from both science communities. This workshop would be open to the larger Euclid and Rubin Observatory communities, not just the DDP-WG. Stay tuned for more information on, and from, the DDP-WG as it gets started, and please don’t hesitate to get in touch with comments, questions, and suggestions, either in the public comments on community or privately, at https://www.lsst.org/scientists/contacts.

Yours in wide-field survey astronomy,

Bob, Yannick, Phil & Jason