4MOST All Hands Meeting 2022

by Joe Liske on 2022-09-27

The 8th 4MOST All Hands Meeting (AHM) took place in Potsdam on 19 – 23 September 2022, bringing together 4MOST engineers, scientists, programmers, and managers from across the globe. The meeting was held in a hybrid format, with more than 100 4MOST members participating on site, while more than 150 members were registered to participate online. The meeting was was held at two locations: at the Albert-Einstein Science Park on the Telegrafenberg and at the AIP Campus site on the Babelsberg. The latter location allowed many of the participants to visit the AIP integration halls and labs to see the instrument being assembled.

The entire team was very excited about the good progress the hardware is making, realising that the shipment of the instrument to the telescope is now scheduled to start in less than a year. The instrument engineers used their time to plan in detail the further assembly and testing process of the hardware in Potsdam, and to work on the integration and verification plans of the instrument on VISTA in Chile. The scientists continued to refine their plans for how to optimise the observing strategy based on the latest survey simulations, and discussed the data release plan. The operations branch of the project discussed the many operation rehearsals scheduled for the coming year and refined the requirements on the pipelines. Two new working groups kicked off at the meeting, one to establish detailed requirements for the early calibrations and science verification phase, and one to plan the data curation and data releases once the data flows from the various data reduction pipelines.

After a hiatus of three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all participants enjoyed the opportunity to connect directly with many colleagues. The possibilities to personally connect were further enhanced during the tour of the historic research facilities at the Telegrafenberg site, at the conference dinner in the hot tropical rain forest environment of the Potsdam BioSphäre, and while visiting the modern research facilities and 4MOST hardware at the AIP site.