Rose Gibson, a junior studying astrophysics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, will be working over the summer as an REU intern with LSST System Scientist Chuck Claver. Rose's project aims to develop predictive capabilities for contrail avoidance within the LSST scheduler. Aircraft and contrail avoidance is one of the short term aspects of the LSST's cadence optimization. Commercial aircraft emit a transponder signal on 1.090 Ghz called ADS-B. These digitally encoded signals provide information about the aircraft's altitude, speed, heading and positions and can be received readily using a small software defined receiver and a Raspberry Pi. Rose's project aims to correlate the received tracks of aircraft and meteorological conditions with visible contrails or resulting thin cirrus clouds. The project will develop the hardware and software in Tucson; then the system will migrate to Chile near the LSST site where it will be used remotely to make observations. Research Education for Undergraduates (REU) is an NSF-sponsored internship program.
Financial support for Rubin Observatory comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Cooperative Support Agreement No. 1202910, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515, and private funding raised by the LSST Corporation. The NSF-funded Rubin Observatory Project Office for construction was established as an operating center under management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). The DOE-funded effort to build the the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera (LSSTCam) is managed by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an
independent federal agency created by Congress
in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.
NSF and DOE will continue to support Rubin Observatory in its Operations phase. They will also provide support for scientific research with LSST data.
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