Subject: Agenda for the LSST SWG next week

From: Michael Strauss

Submitted: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 15:01:18 -0500

Message number: 292 (previous: 291, next: 293 up: Index)

Hello all,
  As you know, we have scheduled a meeting of the LSST Science Working
Group next week at the AAS meeting in San Diego.  The time we had
scheduled: 3-6 PM on Wednesday afternoon, unfortunately conflicts with
two important things:
   The LSST poster session (Session 108), which includes many of the
       LSST folks; 
   An invited talk by Phil Pinto (Session 133) on the LSST itself.  

This conflict is completely my fault; apologies for not checking
earlier for this.  So we are going to move the meeting from Wednesday
afternoon to Thursday morning (January 13), from 9-12.  We're still
looking for a meeting room; I or Jeremy Mould will let everybody know
where we'll meet probably sometime tomorrow.  Please let me know if
you are able to attend. 

  We last met as a working group in Seattle in September.  Things have
been relatively quiet since then.  But I would like to spend the time
we have together to address the question:

  How much of the science described in our DRM document will have been
done by 2012 by Pan-STARRS and other facilities? 

  Pan-STARRS, as you know, is a planned array of four 1.8-m telescope
each with a 3 degree field of view; current plans are for it to see
first light in 2008 (with the first telescope starting operations one
year from now).  It will have an etendue (Collecting Area times field
of view) of 46 m^2 deg^2, roughly 1/5 of the 250 m^2 deg^2 we called
for in our DRM document.  I would like in this meeting to go through
the main science drivers one by one, and have a discussion of what the
breakpoints are for various science goals.  With all of one week's
notice, and a short meeting, we won't be able to answer these
questions, but the real goal will be to phrase the question in each
case quantitatively, and identify the work that needs to be done to
answer the question.  

  For example, in weak lensing science, a 10-year survey and a given
etendue translates to a total sky coverage for a given depth and
number of filters.  We will want to define how the science return
(e.g., error bars on cosmological parameters) to be drawn from such a
survey scales with this sky coverage. 

  In this discussion, we will no doubt find ourselves discussing the
different figures of merit relevant for different science goals.  

  At the end of the meeting, we will talk about how to organize
ourselves to actually carry out the analyses we will find ourselves
needing.  

  Assuming that we conclude that the LSST concept remains
scientifically valuable in the post-PanSTARRS era, the next question
that the SWG needs to address is: what is the scientifically best and
most cost-effective way to get to an etendue of 250 m^2 deg^2?  This
is the (admittedly politically charged) single- vs. multiple-aperture
question.  I will describe a possible way forward to address this
question in what is hopefully an objective way.  

		 Many thanks, 
		 Michael Strauss

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