IN2P31 was an early contributor to the project, and has secured a significant status as the only non-American constructor (beside the host country, Chile), with contributions to the camera sensor testing, camera electronics, and to the filter changer. Furthermore, LSST-France proposes to process 50% of the data and to host a complete copy thereof, a very significant bid which is being currently refined in the context of a “memorandum of agreement on computing”. Amid the breadth of scientific topics that LSST will cover, LSST-France is committed first and foremost to the Dark Energy/Dark Matter cosmological probes, through participation to the LSST DESC.
Currently eight IN2P3 institutes participate to the LSST project through the LSST-France group coordinated by Pierre Antilogus: LPNHE, LAL, LPC, LPSC, CPPM, APC, plus the two service units LMA and CC-IN2P3. The scientific topics investigated within LSST France are the science reach of supernovae, the weak lensing magnification effect, and baryon acoustic oscillations.
Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules, French national institute for nuclear and particle physics↩