Andrew Wright

From Chile to Europe in minutes: handling the data stream from ESO's Paranal Observatory

The ESO telescopes in Chile are operated in a geographically distributed scheme, in which some of the essential steps in the end-to-end observing chain take place in Europe. Most notably, the health status of the instruments as derived from the data themselves is monitored in Europe and the results fed back to the observatory within the hour. The flexibility of this scheme strongly depends on the speed with which the data stream produced by the telescopes can be sent to Europe for analysis and storage. The main challenge to achieve a fast intercontinental data transfer is the data volume itself, which currently reaches an average 25 GB/night (compressed) for the four VLT Unit Telescopes. Since late 2008, this stream has been entirely transferred through the internet via a 4.56 Mbit/s bandwidth assured via a Quality of Service policy, which sufficed to transfer an average night of data within a few hours. A very recent enlargement of this capacity to 9.12 Mbit/s will soon allow the addition of the calibration data for VISTA, the new infrared survey telescope on Paranal, to the data stream transferred through the internet. Ultimately, the average data volume produced on Paranal once the visible VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and the full complement of second-generation VLT instruments becomes available is expected to exceed 200 GB/night. Transferring it over the internet will require a new fiber-based infrastructure currently under construction, as well as the use of additional high bandwidth channels. This infrastructure, provided by the European Union co-funded project EVALSO, should provide a data transfer capacity exceeding 1 Gbit/s that will allow the transfer to Europe of the entire Paranal data stream, as well as that of the nearby Observatory of Cerro Armazones and of the future European Extremely Large Telescope, with a delay of minutes at most since the data were taken.

SciOps2.0: an evolution of ESO/VLT's science operations model

This paper presents the recent changes undergone by the Science Operations department of the ESO Paranal Observatory. This revised science operations model, named SciOps2, aims at improving operations efficiency and quality of the data delivered to our community of users. The changes regarding the new department structure, its staffing, and the distribution of tasks and responsibilities, are described in details, as well as the measured impact of these changes.

EVALSO: a high-bandwidth communication infrastructure to efficiently connect the ESO Paranal and the Cerro Armazones Observatories to Europe

This paper describes the technical choices and the solutions adopted to create high bandwidth (>1Gbps) communication links to both the ESO Paranal and the Cerro Armazones Observatories located in the Atacama Desert, in the Northern region of Chile. The complete system is planned to be in place by mid-2010. This infrastructure is part of the EVALSO[1] (Enabling Virtual Access to Latin-America Southern Observatories) project that is done by a consortium of 9 members and co-founded by the EC (European Commission) within the frame of the FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2007-1.2-02. More on the project is available at www.evalso.eu.

VLT interferometer upgrade for the 2nd generation of interferometric instruments

ESO is undertaking a large upgrade of the infrastructure on Cerro Paranal in order to integrate the 2nd generation of interferometric instruments Gravity and MATISSE, and increase its performance. This upgrade started mid 2014 with the construction of a service station for the Auxiliary Telescopes and will end with the implementation of the adaptive optics system for the Auxiliary telescope (NAOMI) in 2018. This upgrade has an impact on the infrastructure of the VLTI, as well as its sub-systems and scientific instruments.

EVALSO, a high-bandwidth communication infrastructure to efficiently connect the ESO Paranal and the Cerro Armazones Observatories to Europe: demonstration activities and start of operations

EVALSO (Enabling Virtual Access to Latin-American Southern Observatories) is an international consortium of nine astronomical organizations, and research network operators, part-funded under the European Commission FP7, to create and exploit high-speed bandwidth connections to the observatories of Cerro Paranal and Cerro Armazones in Chile. The communication infrastructure was delivered in November 2010 and this paper reports on the initial results of the project and the demonstrations of its capabilities, including the possibilities that the new infrastructure opens up in the geographically distributed operation of the observatories.

High fill factor RF aperture arrays for improved passive, real-time millimeter wave imaging

Sensors operating in the millimeter wave region of the electromagnetic spectrum provide valuable situational awareness in degraded visual environments, helpful in navigation of rotorcraft and fixed wing aircraft. Due to their relatively long wavelength, millimeter waves can pass through many types of visual obscurants, including smoke, fog, dust, blowing sand, etc. with low attenuation. Developed to take advantage of these capabilities, ourmillimeter wave imager employs a unique, enabling receiver architecture based on distributed aperture arrays and optical upconversion. We have reported previously on operation and performance of our passive millimeter wave imager, including field test results in DVE and other representative environments, as well as extensive flight testing on an H-1 rotorcraft. Herein we discuss efforts to improve RF and optical component hardware integration, with the goal to increase manufacturability and reduce c-SWaP of the system. These outcomes will allow us to increase aperture sizes and channel counts, thereby providing increased receiver sensitivity and overall improved image quality. These developments in turn will open up new application areas for the passive millimeter wave technology, as well as better serving existing ones.

Packaging of High-Gain Multichip Module in Multilayer LCP Substrates at

In this paper, we packaged a multichip module (MCM) in multilayer liquid crystal polymer (LCP) substrate using V-shaped wire bond and 3-D-printed housing. In the proposed module, two low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) are cascaded in series to obtain high gain and low noise figure, and multilayer circuit is designed to achieve high assembly density. To minimize mode mismatch between microstrip lines on LNA and LCP with low dielectric constant, V-shaped wire bond was designed for LNA integration, achieving low insertion loss and low reflection at

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-band. To verify this bonding design experimentally, a single-chip module was first integrated and characterized, successfully achieving a gain of more than 26.5 dB from 80 to 100 GHz. Then, the MCM was investigated and packaged, in which substrate integrated waveguides and via barriers are introduced to eliminate the potential substrate modes, and 3-D-printed plastic housing coated with gold is designed to capsulate the LNAs and isolate them in free space. The measured data demonstrate a high gain of 50 dB, a low noise figure of less than 6 dB, and linear phase from 80 to 97 GHz.

Module integration and amplifier design optimization for optically enabled passive millimeter-wave imaging

This paper will discuss the development of a millimeter-wave (mm-wave) receiver module used in a sparse array passive imaging system. Using liquid crystal polymer (LCP) technology and low power InP low noise amplifiers (LNA), enables the integration of the digital circuitry along with the RF components onto a single substrate significantly improves the size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) of the mm-wave receiver module compared to previous iterations of the module. Also comparing with previous generation modules, the operating frequency has been pushed from 77 GHz to 95 GHz in order to improve the resolution of the captured image from the sparse array imaging system.