Being the NRT1 an international collaboration to design and build a leading astronomical facility, it will be focused in the optical and near infrared ranges for the emergent area of time domain astronomy. This will rely on the mix of a large collecting area (4 m diameter), quick response (<30 s), and full robotic operation. The Telescope Level System (TLS) will be responsible for controlling, coordinating, monitoring and planning, both hardware and software systems, involved in the operation of the telescope. The NRT control system architecture aims to follow best practices in services decoupling and deployment, following recent techniques in containerization and orchestration (dockerization). This type of system will give a great stability, scalability, and flexibility, allowing new services to be added or removed, minimizing downtime scenarios. This approach is based on the know-how gathered with the control system (GCS)2 of the Spanish 10 m telescope GTC (Gran Telescopio de Canarias)3, which has been operating successfully for more than a decade. Currently, GCS does not support a robotic control, being the challenge for the NRT project6,7, to extend the functionality of the GCS with this new feature of autonomous operation4,5. The NRT aims to keep the GCS model of decoupling system components, having distributed execution and communications. Another advantage is the abstraction from low-level hardware and software, which GCS offers at the moment of integration new entities into the system. We discuss the interest and possible deployment of this kind of TLS for future based robotic facilities.
The 4m class New Robotic Telescope being built on La Palma, Canary Islands, will build upon the successful autonomous robotic operations model of the Liverpool Telescope. The software stack brings together Telescope Level Systems built using an adaptation from the GranTeCan Control System, with a new Robotic Control System replacing a human operator. On top of this sits the observer and operations interface systems for submission observations, retrieval of data and monitoring of operational progress. This software stack has been developed as a simulated end-to-end minimal viable product (MVP) complete with a simulated telescope and imaging instrument. We present our experiences of applying agile continuous integration methodologies and practices to develop our software and highlight the benefits of this approach in development of systems that will power a modern astronomical observatory that is still in construction.
The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) is a new UK/Spain 4-m optical telescope on La Palma. When complete it will be the world’s largest and fastest, fully autonomous optical observatory and is being designed to address the coming era of time-domain and transient astrophysics. We summarise the planned software architecture, presented as a complete, coordinated observatory system from telescope axis control, through intelligent, automated scheduling, up to the user interfaces available at astronomers’ home desks. We have adopted a blend of proven software from existing telescopes with developing new systems suited to the telescope’s unique requirements and to modern web-based, collaboration models. We pay particular attention to aspects of the software stack that distinguish this project and enable the unsupervised, autonomous science operations in which observers around the globe can specify and monitor their observing requests intra-night without needing any support from observatory staff.
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