Monday

The LSST era will herald a new era of new transient identification which will have a large impact on the operations of facilities which will perform more detaiuled follow-up. One of the prime science goals of the 4m class New Robotic Telescope NRT is to provide photometric, spectroscopic and polarimetric followup of transient alerts.

Whilst the Southern Hemisphere site of the LSST means that there is a limited overlap of observable sky from the Northern Hemisphere NRT site, the anticipated number of transient alerts (~10^7) per night means that the NRT could be highly focused on time critical follow-up observations.

The era has been called the `transient firehose', where numbers of transient alerts which are generated are many orders of magnitude more than could ever be followed up. Alert broker systems linked with smart filters and machine learning classifications will aid in reducing the dataset into a more manageable size for selecting targets for follow-up.

For the NRT, we must design an Observation Entry interface and Scheduling system which enables integration with the alert brokers and contains scheduling decisions and features based on the temporal sampling of specific transient scientific cases.