 Alright everyone, our first speaker of the night is a bald man from Arizona. Please welcome Dr. David Trillin. I'm David Trillin from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. It's great to be here in Seattle. It's great to see everybody here. Thank you for coming out. We have an all-star team tonight to talk to you about various things in the solar system. I'm the warm-up act. I'm going to talk to you about the large synoptic survey telescope. What you can't see here is an artist rendition of the large synoptic survey telescope. I'm going to show you some actual photos. Here's the nutshell in case you're too busy for you to bear for the next 10 minutes. The large synoptic survey telescope science begins in 2022. It's my best skill. I'm in the right place. Okay, LST is going to scan the entire night sky every three to four nights for 10 years. That's about 10 terabytes of data every night, which is a huge computational challenge. And there are four science pillars which are listed here. Nature of dark matter and dark energy, cataloging the solar system, exploring the changing sky, and Milky Way structure and formation. So tonight I'm going to talk about, and others are going to talk about, cataloging the solar system, which is here in Orange Island. I can't see it very well, but that's the one I highlighted. We don't know anything about the other three topics at all, so we're just going to tell you about it. Okay, this is a picture of the LST mirror. The mirror is 8.4 meters in diameter. That's really the back of the crowd over there. And these are actual human beings surrounding the mirror and sitting inside the mirror. Don't try that at home. This is just to show you how big the mirror is. This thing was built in Tucson. It's sitting in a box in Tucson. It's ready to go to the mountain in Chile. It's waiting for the observatory to be ready for it. This is a picture of the camera. It's sort of a schematic. So on the upper left is this. I'm sorry that you can't see this very well. It's a giant CAD diagram of a giant camera, which is about the size of a small car. And the camera on the sky is the thing in the lower right over here. The full moon is there to show you for scale. So for an astronomical camera, this is really, really enormous. There's multiple full moons on the sky. And again, this thing is the size of a car, and you saw the mirror how big that was. So this is a really big monster. Here's a comparison. So the thing in the middle that you can't see is the LSST field on the sky. And the little white box on the right says HDTV. So LSST is 3.2 billion pixels. That's the camera. And on the right, there's your HDTV that you have at home watching the Sound with Games on. And that's 2 million pixels. So you need 1,500 HDTV screens to look at a single LSST image. 1,500. You could piece the entire side of a building with HDTV screens just to show a single LSST image. And LSST is going to take you to just every 15 seconds the whole night for 10 years in a row. Nobody's ever going to look at an LSST image. You might not have a little piece of it, but nobody's ever going to look at the whole thing because nobody's got 1,500 HDTVs. So that's why I said this is a huge computational challenge. You've got to tell your computer to tell you how to extract the information you want from this thing so that you could do something scientifically interesting with it. Okay. There's a movie here that you also can't see. I apologize for that. And these are little LSST footprints driving across the sky. So LSST, again, has the skill to view that's how big. And it goes from a chunk across the sky every night for 10 years. And every one of these little footprints, you could maybe see a circle right there. It's a circle that represents an LSST pointing on the sky. It contains 10 million galaxies in that image. And then there's the next image, and then there's the next image, and then there's the next image. And so the bottom line is that after 10 years, there'll be 40 billion objects catalogued in the LSST catalog, far more objects than are humans on Earth. Okay. What else do we have? Okay. Here's a map of most of the world. I couldn't get the whole thing to fit. There we are at the Peddler Brewing Company. The telescope's going to go in Chile. So on the west coast of South America here, there's a kind of a zoom in. I'm going to skip through that. Okay. There's kind of this rendition on the right side of what the telescope's going to look like on the mountain. But I'm going to skip to the next one and I'm going to show you what the telescope looks like on the mountain. So here's our Jerome footage of the LSST construction site in Chile. This is a couple of months old. You can see there's a tour bus down there. There's a bunch of people walking around. There's some cars and trucks here. So this round thing that you're looking at is where the telescope itself is going to go. And then down on the other side, I'll show you in just a minute, is the kind of control building. Okay. So in the middle of that round cement circle, there's over that 8.4 meter, the meterer is going to go on top of this mountain in Chile. It's not far from the autopsy counter. So it's not quite there, but almost. Okay. So here's an actual, like a still shot. This is from the, looking at the side of the building under construction. This is more recent. This is from a few weeks ago. And, okay, so I'm going to turn off the sun so you can see my picture better. On the top right, there's kind of a superstructure. And there's little tiny people up on the top right, which you can't see. But the point is it's a very big building that holds this very big here. This is a new... Okay. So the inside of the big building is the thing that's called the telescope mount assembly that holds the big mirror. Oh. Where are you going to see the movie plays? Yes. Okay. It's kind of dancing it there. Okay. So this is being built in Spain. This is a big circular ring that holds that big mirror. And the whole thing has to move all over the sky. And that's what you can see in this movie. This is a stop motion version. And there's people walking around. You can see the size of this thing. So again, in terms of telescopes, this is a really, really, really big machine. And it's supposed to work every night, extremely well for 10 years in a row. Okay. What else? So this is another little movie that's showing you on your left side. This is a simulation of how the system is going to point during its 10 years. So it's a complicated business to figure out where you're going to point this thing and how you're going to observe enough of the sky and the right cadence that you can do in science for you and for you and for you and for you. So this is a simulation of the pointing. You can maybe see these little dots that are getting drawn on this thing. That's the sky working its ground. And this is just a guess, an instance of a simulation about how the LSD might observe these 10 years. And what happens is you run the simulation over and over and over again. It has simulated that weather in it. It's simulated poor conditions and good conditions. And after you've done this many times, you can say, okay, well, we think we understand good ways to operate the facility and not so good ways to operate the facility. And I just want to point out that there's key work being done really all over the world on this project. But we're particularly here in Seattle University of Washington as well as Princeton. Alright, moving out to University of Washington. It's Princeton, Stanford, and Tucson and lots of other places as well. Okay, there we go. How many of you want to look at the Gantt chart? We have to see if there are people excited for the Gantt chart. More Gantt charts. Okay, this is the only Gantt chart I've bought, but I can read books more. Don't read Gantt charts every day in your life. Go for you. Let me remind you how this works. At the top is a calendar. These are federal fiscal years. Okay, so 2014 and 2024. And down here at the bottom, there's read boxes now. So we're in the middle of fiscal year 2018, close to the end, I guess. And over here in full system integration start at the bottom of fiscal year 2020. That means first light. It means we're starting to do stuff on the summit. Photons coming from the universe down into the telescope and onto the computers. So that's in 2020. And then there's a big red diamond on the bottom right here. Science operations start. That's the beginning of federal fiscal year 2023. October of 2022. Which sort of sounds like a long time from now, but it's not really a long time from now. It's preparing this giant machine to work and the computer power that we need to be ready to fill. Okay, I would be remiss to not point out who's paying for all this. It's your tax dollars and mine. The National Science Foundation is paying for most of it to the tune of $473 million. Department of Energy, not to collect dollars, $168 million. They're building the camera. And also there was about $50 million in private support, which is kind of amazing as well. Okay, who's going to use this data? That's a good question. So any astronomer in the US has access to this data. There also are other countries that have entered into partnerships with them, access to the data. And there's going to be a substantial public program as well, which means you should invite me back in five years and we'll talk about that. Absolutely. Okay, so here's back to the nutshell. You can look up out of your ear now and here's the nutshell again. Science begins in 2022. Webinar 10 terabytes of data every night. This is a major, major computational challenge. I showed you pictures of the hardware, the mirror, the telescope mount, the building on the summit. I can't really show you pictures of Python code, but there's a lot of Python code that exists as well, and there will be continued, that's a huge investment in development in this project. And finally there's Explore Science Pillars, Dark Matter, Solar System, Changing Sky, and Milky Way. So I just want to point out the reason that I'm here and the reason that we're here is because the LSSD Solar System Science Collaboration is meeting this week at UW and we're drinking beer. And so the rest of the talks you're going to hear tonight are experts in Solar System Science. Thank you very much. Do I call on the questions? How much of the 10 terabytes is being stored and how all of it on a disk? Maybe more than one disk. Is it back on? Yeah. What exactly is it serving? Are you just like mapping out what you're looking at or is it just finding anything of interest? So the question is are we going to find anything of interest? I hope so. So the question is why is this called a Servant Telescope? You know, I gave you some really vague stuff here. So each one of these four pillars is kind of an overarching science theme that the science community, the astronomy community has decided on four important investigation avenues. Within each one of these there's 10 to 100 different science questions. For example, how many aphids are there that are in orbits across the universe? Or is there another giant planet next out in the outer solar system? Or what the heck is dark energy anyway? Or exploring the changing sky might be the nature of supernova or stuff like that. So there are a lot of different individual investigations and the data will be used in different ways to address those questions. What techniques did you use for modeling all the different nights of observing? What techniques are used for modeling the different nights of observing? So in Chile they've done an extensive site survey where they record over many years what fraction of nights have good conditions and bad conditions, what is the weather fraction, what's the, you know, and so on. And those are put into basically a meteorological model. And then you also say, okay, my requirement is 10 years of science and I need to curve every point in the sky so it's a number of times. And then it's just an optimization problem. And you run that thing and you have a random function on your weather and then you run it again with the random function again. And then over time you say, okay, well this observing strategy seems like it's successful. This observing strategy seems like it's not successful. So we know which way to sort of go. There's no perfect solution. I mean, it's sort of an optimization without perfection. Was it a Monte Carlo simulation? It is a Monte Carlo simulation. Yeah, that's the only part of what I'm saying. Who's your, I do a question. I do a question. I do a question. I'm going to get an S in 10 years. Do you think it's about 100 years like today? So the question is, how do you manage that much data? Do you mean in terms of storage it or do you mean in terms of analyzing it? Yes. Yes. Okay. I'm not sure I'm the right person. I don't know all the technical answers on that. I mean, in terms of storing it, it's just an array of disks. In terms of processing it, most of the processing is done at NSCA. I don't know if I can get the right national supercomputer things for agency. Sure. So they have lots of supercomputers there and this is really a scaling problem. You can do it on a small image once per night pretty easily. Now can I do it on 1,000 images per night, every night for 10 years? And you have to do it fast enough so you don't get behind it. Because if it takes you 24 hours to process 12 hours of data, then you'll never catch up. So the answer is a lot of computers. Okay. Yeah. How does LSD compare and contrast with Gaia? Yeah. That's your question. So Gaia is an all-sky satellite that's in space and it's really good at mapping positions of the stars. It's actually better than LSD at that time. But there are lots of other things that LSD is doing that Gaia is not as good at. For example, Gaia, you don't actually get images back from Gaia. You get this rather complicated thing that I don't totally understand. With LSD, there's a whole image. So you're never going to look at the whole image, but if you say, that's my favorite asteroid. Let me show you a picture of it. You can go and get a little cut out from the image and look at your favorite asteroid. Gaia, you can't do that work, for example. Also, the operational timeline and the way of surveying the sky is different. I'm not saying what's better than just covering it. You've already got it. The question is, is LSD going to investigate nature of dark energy and changing the sky within the Milky Way or across the whole sky? The answer is throughout the whole universe. So dark energy is on cosmological scales of the outer galaxy that's out into whatever else is out there. Exploring the changing sky is a really tricky one because there has not been a really good survey that tells us what kinds of things change on the night sky. LSD sometimes is described as a movie of the night sky. That you think of the night sky as perfectly static and changing. LSD and other similar precursor surveys are showing is that there's a lot of things that change stars that vary, asteroids that vary. And so we're going to investigate that across the whole of the sky. Can I do one more? Can I see anything? Yeah. It's over 10 years. Did you get it? Wow, good question. The question is, over 10 years do you see the whole sky or the blind spots? So the telescope is going to be in South America. And so it can't actually see the northern sky off. You see, almost all the whole southern sky is maybe a piece of the far southern pole that may or may not be in the dirt. We're not sure. But the whole northern sky will not be in the dirt. We're all the analysis team. And so for this astronomical point of view, you say, well, things in the south are just the same as things in the north. And so that's fine. But if there's some special thing like an interstellar comet that was just passing through the solar system and happened to only be in the northern sky, the assistive would not see it. But you can only put the telescope in one place. So that's how it works. I forgot to mention, if you've completed your trivia, please take your trivia and bring it up to the black box where the computers are sitting. And that way we can grade it. Because the LSSD has supported us with some wonderful prizes that we're going to give away. So we're just going to take a few seconds to let people watch.