A brief update of SSSC (Solar System Science Collaboration) happenings over the past month. A more detailed version will be sent out on the SSSC listserv.
Science Roadmap - A draft of the SSSC Science Roadmap has been sent to the working group leads for their feedback. Once their feedback has been incorporated, in January a full version will be sent to the SSSC membership for further comments.
SSSC Charter- We have incorporated the feedback received on the draft SSSC charter, which outlines the current common practices the SSSC leadership/membership has been operating under for transparency and clarity. We are asking for additional feedback on the revised draft. We’ll have a vote for adoption of the final version of charter by the collaboration later in January.
Publication Policy questions - There has been some questions about whether there will be a publication policy that came up during the last round of feedback on the SSSC Charter draft. Currently the SSSC charter draft does not address this. The majority of moving objects will be made public in the alert stream, which makes coming up with a fair and appropriate publication policy more difficult than for some of the other science collaborations. We plan over the next year or two to gather input from the SSSC on how the collaboration wants to proceed on this aspect and if a publication policy is desired we would have one drafted in a similar manner to the current SSSC charter effort and go through feedback and a vote for adoption.
LSSTC Science Collaboration Coordinator - Lucianne Walkowicz has stepped down as the LSSTC Science Collaboration Coordinator. Federica Bianco (NYU) has now taken on this role. Federica now serves as the liaison between the science collaborations and the LSST Corporation. Her best contact email is fbianco ‘at’ nyu.edu, and she’s also available on slack if you have any questions or concerns you want to discuss with her directly.
Community Data Q&A - on community.lsst.org there is now a place to ask questions about LSST data products and services that will be provided to future LSST users. Questions will be answered by the Data Management team as needed. https://community.lsst.org/c/sci/data. A friendly reminder to check out the SSSC software and data products pages to see first if your question has already been answered in our FAQs.
LSST AAS Town Hall - the LSST Town Hall at AAS 231 at the National Harbor, MD. It will take place on Wednesday, January 10th, 2018, at 7:30 pm. There will be a review of the developments in the planning of LSST’s observing strategy and commissioning policies, and updates from the LSST Corporation and Science Collaborations on community preparations for science with LSST.
LSST Project Plans for 2018 - there was a join science collaboration chairs and project science team telecon at the end of November on the overall 2018 LSST Project plans. You can find the slides here and video here.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.