Rubin LSST: Introductory workshop

Program    List of Participants for Workshop 1

Objective of the workshop

To introduce the Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and the Indian scientific interests in the survey.

Background

The Vera C. Rubin observatory's Legacy survey of Space and Time is an ambitious project that will take giant strides toward understanding the Universe by mapping out a large part of the observable sky over many epochs. The key science areas that Rubin is expected to address are: 1) Cosmology: Probing dark energy and dark matter 2) Solar system: Making an inventory of objects in the solar system 3) Extragalactic science: evolution of galaxies and their connections to dark matter 4) Transients: Monitoring and exploring the transient sky, and 5) Mapping the Milky way via faint stars. The Rubin LSST survey is expected to begin from the spring of 2024.

The Rubin India participation group is an informal group of scientists from six different institutes (IUCAA, TIFR, NCRA, IIA, IIT Indore, IISER Pune) with rights to date from the Rubin LSST. These scientists have a variety of interests in the LSST. They are expected to provide in-kind contributions in order to obtain data rights to the proprietary data which will be provided by LSST. The survey will make regular public data releases which will allow the wider astronomy community to also carry out scientific analyses. This will require familiarity with the data products that LSST will provide.

This workshop would signal the start of the capacity building exercise for the Rubin India participation group and we hope would be the first in a series of such ASI workshops.

Rationale

The main goals of the workshop are: 1. to introduce the Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the current construction status 2. to introduce the different Rubin science collaborations and the current and future Indian contributions to the survey 3. to display the breadth of the science interests from Indian scientists in Rubin LSST 4. practical demonstration of the use of the Rubin science pipelines on precursor data.

Format of the meeting

We will divide the workshop into 4 main sections along the lines of the main goals of the workshop indicated above. The first session will cover the first two goals and we will invite prominent speakers from the Rubin LSST collaboration and keep ample time for question answer sessions and discussions. The next two sessions will feature talks demonstrating the current Indian science interests in the Rubin LSST survey. The last session will be a tutorial for the use of the Rubin science pipeline on precursor data.
We expect to host upto 50 participants in the offline session.

Proposers

Surhud More (IUCAA), Girish Kulkarni (NCRA), C. Stalin (IIA), Abhirup Dutta (IIT Indore), Susmita Adhikari (IISER Pune), Arka Banerjee (IISER Pune), Yogesh Wadadekar (NCRA)