The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a state-of-the-art astronomical survey facility on Cerro Pachón in Chile and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE) through a Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) award of more than half a billion dollars. It comprises a powerful 8.4-meter telescope and a 3.2-gigapixel camera—the largest camera ever built. The focus of this project is to discover the structure and evolution of the universe and the celestial objects it contains. The project is conducting a ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), making a movie of the night sky, which will allow astronomers to discover anything relating to sky changes, such as exploding stars, potentially dangerous asteroids, or distant supermassive black holes consuming gas. The survey will catalog billions of new galaxies and stars, better measure the expansion of the universe, map the distribution of dark matter, and make new, unimagined discoveries.
CAPS Work on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Project:
The CAPS team at NCSA works as part of the larger Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Management Group. The team primarily focuses on data movement, archiving, and orchestration of pipeline processing.
CAPS Personnel Holding Leadership Roles on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Project:
Gautham Narayan: Acting Board Member, LSST Discovery Alliance
Stephen Pietrowicz: NCSA Team Lead and Local Principal Investigator
Current CAPS Personnel on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Project:
Greg Daues (CAPS Research Programmer)
Michelle Gower (CAPS Lead Research Programmer)
Robert Gruendl: (CAPS Senior Research Scientist)
Mikolaj Kowalik: (CAPS Research Software Engineer)
Felipe Menanteau (CAPS Senior Research Scientist)
Gautham Narayan (CAPS Deputy Director)
Stephen Pietrowicz (CAPS Principal Research Software Engineer)