Jason Surace (IPAC) - PTF to ZTF: Gearing up for IPAC's Next Big Project, and the Science Behind It

For the last five years IPAC has been the data processing and archiving center for the Palomar Transient Factory, a synoptic sky survey that scans of order a thousand square degrees per night of sky searching for transient and variable phenomena. The Zwicky Transient Facility will increase this by an order of magnitude, allowing the entire northern sky to be scanned every night. ZTF has recently achieved full funding and is now proceeding at a breakneck pace towards first light at the start of 2017. This will be IPAC's most ambitious data handling project, with roughly a petabyte of processed data per year being generated. In this talk I will discuss both the nuts and bolts of the project (telescope, camera, data system, etc) as well as the science drivers behind it. ZTF is particularly important in that it is recognized by NSF as the prototype for understanding how to organize the science community and it's tools to handle the LSST data stream. Note - this talk is primarily intended as an introduction to ZTF for IPAC. In particular, if you attended the iPTF workshop on campus in August, you will have seen much of the material.