Swiss In-Kind Contributions to CTAO
Telescope control software
CTAO would not work without software, computers and vast amounts of storage. CTAO has designed a system to support the operations from telescope control and data processing at the telescope sites (ACADA), to the Data Pipeline and Preservation System (DPPD) processing CTAO data in four data centres in Europe, and the interface to the scientific community from proposal handling to the distribution of data (SUSS). Switzerland participates at different levels in the development of the CTAO data processing system and is providing one of the four data centres, as presented below.
The control software for the LST and SST telescopes is based on the ALMA observatory common software (ACS) framework. The control logic of each telescope is separated into three main components: Camera Manager, Structure Manager and Telescope Manager. The Telescope Manager is orchestrating the other two and is the main entry point for the CTAO Array Control and Acquisition (ACADA) system to control the telescopes. All control software is designed to implement the full list of CTAO use-cases for regular data-taking and long-term maintenance of the instruments.
Initially developed for the SST-1M, from 2019 the team at the Astronomy Department/UniGe has been involved in the development of the central control software system for the LSTs, namely the Telescope Control Unit (TCU). The software has been successfully deployed in 2020 on-site and made it possible the remote control and monitoring of the telescope during the lockdown and the Cumbre Vieja volcano eruption on La Palma island when the physical presence of operators was not possible. By now the TCU system has reached the level of fully automatic schedule-based operations, which only requires general supervision of the telescope and weather conditions by remote operators. For the commissioning phase, the TCU also implements the MAGIC follow-up operations mode to perform common observations with LSTs for cross-calibration and reach higher sensitivity. In 2022 CTAO started a formal process of LST-1 integration into ACADA. Integration includes a few major milestones: integrate ACADA with LST-1 using interfaces, test the interfaces, test ACADA deployment on the LST-1 IT centre and test the execution of end-to-end operations with the integrated ACADA-LST-1 system. The LST-1 integration activity will be useful for the future acceptance of telescopes by CTAO and paves the path to serve other telescope types. Dr V. Sliusar of the Astronomy Department is the lead developer of TCU and LST deputy software coordinator. Changes in the LST hardware at the Southern site have to be included to account for the higher seismic risk and will require TCU software adaptation but the same components, frameworks, general principles and control logic can be re-used.