Congratulations on first alerts! Several members of the SSSC have tried going to the SNAPS (Solar System Notification Alert Processing System) broker website over the past two days, and it states “Webpage under construction. We will be adding LSST survey and alert stream to our catalog shortly.” There hasn’t been any change in the banner message since Tuesday.
Does anyone know the current status of SNAPS? Is ANTARES sending onward to SNAPS?
I don’t see SNAPS on the lineup for the giving a Rubin Science Assembly. Are they not scheduled for a reason? Can then they be scheduled to give one soon?
Hi, thanks for these questions. I can address the last two. As I understand it, all brokers are progressing through their own commissioning processes, and there was never an expectation that all nine would be serving alerts to users at the time of the nominal ‘first alert’. All brokers have been invited to give presentations during the Rubin Science Assemblies and the Community Science team is working with each, to schedule them at a time that works best for them over the coming weeks/months, SNAPS included.
I agree there wasn’t an expectation that all brokers would be ready serving alerts to users at the time of the first alerts, but given access to Solar System alert information is limited as most brokers are not serving Solar System alerts, it would be useful if Rubin was helping to communicate which brokers would be available at the time of first alerts and encouraging the brokers who are not ready to provide more information to the community about their current status.
So to confirm, it will be at least 2 months after the start of alerts before there will be any presentation/update by the SNAPS broker team to the community via the Rubin Assemblies?
thanks for this question, meg (and others who have asked me). SNAPS is really close!
our v2.0 web page is scheduled to launch very soon – hopefully later today! – with our new URL. we are ingesting LSST alerts, but have a little bit more debugging to do before we can serve these to the community. and our documentation (to be posted in arXiv, so it can be immediately available) is pretty close too.
i expect that we’ll be serving LSST alerts within a few days (aspirational, but possible, i think). i think our arXiv posting could probably happen on the ~two week time scale.
we will get on the Rubin Assemblies schedule, but we won’t wait for that to start serving data, of course.
thanks for your patience – we really are close. we are just as excited as you are to be able to serve these data to the community!