In early March, the LSST camera was installed in the Vera Rubin Observatory on a Chilean mountaintop! SMCAS has been following the development of the LSST for many years in our monthly presentations, field trips, news updates, Event Horizon articles, and even our YouTube channel!
“The world’s largest digital camera made in the Bay Area has now been installed in Chile. The camera is the size of a car and could unlock new views of the universe. It’s called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera. We are listed in the Guinness Book of World Records,” said Aaron Roodman, in this ABC7News article.
For more details on the Vera Rubin Observatory and the LSST, you can find a number of articles published on our website and in our Event Horizon newsletter. SMCAS President Michael Cooke wrote a great review of the LSST last August that was published in the Aug/Sep 2024 Event Horizon. For a timeline pictorial view of milestones in the 30 year history of the LSST since its first conception as a napkin sketch in the mid 1990’s, access the Vera Rubin Observatory website.
Some highlights of our journey with the LSST, beginning with the most recent event are:
On November 3 2023, Hannah Pollek, Mechanical Engineer at SLAC, spoke to us about the LSST, her work with the camera, and her hope to be there to help install it. Her talk description is posted on our website, and the video recording of her presentation is available on our YouTube Channel.
I recently reached out to Hannah to see if she was able to be at the Vera Rubin Observatory for the installation, and her kind reply is as follows;
Hi Marion!
I am writing this email from the control room at the Rubin Observatory!! I have been going back and forth between California and Chile every two weeks for the entirety of 2025 so far, I was not present for the installation itself, but have been heavily involved in other summit operations in preparation for the installation and after the fact. It is a very busy and exciting time at the observatory, and we hope to get things ready to go on sky in the near future!
Cheers,
Hannah
On February 1 2019, Professor of Physics and Astrophysics at SLAC, Aaron Roodman, who was also responsible for the integration and testing of the LSST camera and was quoted in the ABC7 article referenced above, spoke to us about the future of the LSST. At the time of his talk, LSST was an acronym for Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. His talk description posted on our website gives a good summary of what is planned for the LSST.
The talk by Aaron Roodman was soon followed by a field trip to SLAC including the LSST clean room on February 22, 2019, arranged by former SMCAS Board member and long time member, Bill Lockman. Bill was also a UC Santa Cruz Senior Research Physicist in the Institute for Particle Physics there, as well as a Visiting Scientist at SLAC. This trip was documented by Bill in his article on page 7 of the Jan-Feb-Mar 2019 issue of the Event Horizon. In that same Event Horizon on page 5, you might notice another great article about the LSST by Ken Lum.
Our first formal exposure to the LSST was on November 1 2015, in a talk by Joshua Meyers, at the time a post doctoral student at Stanford, who was working on aspects of the LSST. Joshua is now a Staff Scientist at SLAC. In his talk, he covered the science mission of the LSST. His talk description is on the SMCAS website, including a couple photographs of the mirror manufacturing in process and the proposed observatory building.
And some of you may recall our first formal exposure to the LSST was on May 8 2015, as part of a SMCAS field trip to SLAC. On this tour we were given a private tour of the LSST assembly clean room just as it was completed and very empty. The tour was led by friend of SMCAS, Mandeep Gill, at that time a Research Scientist and Observational Cosmologist at SLAC, now a Research Staff Member at the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy. This field trip was documented, with many pictures in an article on pages 8 of my June 2015 Event Horizon article.
Let us know if you see yourself and where in each of the pictures.
Newer SMCAS members, see if you can identify some of our long-term members!