M. Pucillo

Active optics handling inside Galileo Telescope

A large part of the active optics system and control environment for the Galileo telescope has been developed and tested. Presently the primary mirror support cell has been characterized for the mechanical and optical aspects. The primary mirror has also been characterized and tested with the active support system in work. Part of the mechanics for the secondary and tertiary active mirror supports has been constructed and we plan to start the characterization work in the second half of this year. An overview of the main results obtained during factory acceptance tests and a discussion about the general informatics implementation is here provided.

Commissioning of the Italian National Telescope Galileo

The commissioning phase of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo is started during the first half of 97. Large parts of the drive, the optical and the control system have been mounted at the telescope in site (LaPalma, Canary Islands). The telescope is expected to be ready for the technical first- light during February - March 98 while the instrumentation first-light is expected for mid 98. On this review of the commissioning operations we will describe the problems encountered and the results achieved integrating the main telescope subsystems.

Status of the Galileo National Telescope

The Project Telescopio Nazionale GALILEO (TNG) will provide a 3.5-m telescope for the Italian astronomical community. Its main features closely parallel those of the ESO New Technology Telescope (NNT). We describe here its characteristics and its most important differences with respect to the NTT. The figuring of the three mirrors was successfully completed, with results exceeding the specifications. The telescope structure has been assembled in the workshop, and alignment tests are under way. The control system (motors, encoders, VME and workstation environment) is also in an advanced stage of development. The TNG will be part of the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, in the Canary Islands. Its location is on the West side of the mountain, some 400-m from the NOT; excavation works are already well advanced. Civil works should be finished in the course of the current year. It is expected to complete the rotating building, and the erection of the telescope before the end of 1995, to start regular operations in 1996.

EVALSO: enabling virtual access to Latin American southern observatories

In the field of observational astrophysics, the remoteness of the facilities and the ever increasing data volumes and detectors poses new technological challenges. As an example, the VISTA and VST wide field telescopes, which are being constructed at the ESOs Cerro Paranal Observatory and will be ready in the next few years, have cameras which will produce after just one year of operation a volume of data that will exceed all the data collected by the VLT since the start of operations in 1999. This sets serious limitations if such large quantities of data must be transferred and accessed in a short time by the participating European Institutions. The EVALSO project, approved by the European Community, addresses these targets in two major ways. It will create a physical infrastructure to efficiently connect these facilities to Europe. This infrastructure will be complementary to the international infrastructure already created in the last years with the EC support (RedCLARA, ALICE, GEANT). Besides this, it will provide the astronomers with Virtual Presence (VP), i.e. the tools to perform and control an astronomical observation from the users site. The main role of INAF - Astronomical Observatory of Trieste (OAT) within the project will be the definition of the architecture, the development of VP system and the integration of a prototype to be used as a demonstrator. This paper will focus on the description of the Virtual Presence system.

Control software and electronics architecture design in the framework of the E-ELT instrumentation

During the last years the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in collaboration with other European astronomical institutes, has started several feasibility studies for the E-ELT (European-Extremely Large Telescope) instrumentation and post-focal adaptive optics. The goal is to create a flexible suite of instruments to deal with the wide variety of scientific questions astronomers would like to see solved in the coming decades. In this framework INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Trieste (INAF-AOTs) is currently responsible of carrying out the analysis and the preliminary study of the architecture of the electronics and control software of three instruments: CODEX (control software and electronics) and OPTIMOS-EVE/OPTIMOS-DIORAMAS (control software). To cope with the increased complexity and new requirements for stability, precision, real-time latency and communications among sub-systems imposed by these instruments, new solutions have been investigated by our group. In this paper we present the proposed software and electronics architecture based on a distributed common framework centered on the Component/Container model that uses OPC Unified Architecture as a standard layer to communicate with COTS components of three different vendors. We describe three working prototypes that have been set-up in our laboratory and discuss their performances, integration complexity and ease of deployment.

An embeddable control system for astronomical instrumentation

Large experimental facilities, like telescopes and focal plane instrumentation in the astronomical domain, are becoming more and more complex and expensive, as well as control systems for managing such instruments. The general trend, as can be learned by realizations carried out in the most recent years, clearly drives to most cost-effective solutions: widespread, stable standards in the software field, COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) components and industry standards in the hardware field. Therefore a new generation of control system products needs to be developed, in order to help the scientific community to minimize the cost and efforts required for maintenance and control of their facilities. In the spirit of the aforementioned requirements and to provide a low-cost software and hardware environment we present a working prototype of a control system, based on RTAI Linux and on ACS (Advanced Control System) framework ported to an embedded platform. The hardware has been chosen among COTS components: a PC/104+ platform equipped with a PMAC2A motion controller card and a commercial StrongARM single board controller. In this way we achieved a very powerful, inexpensive and robust real-time control system which can be used as a general purpose building block in the design of new instruments and could also be proposed as a standard in the field.

Software integration at TNG and Active Optics: a practical example

Since March 1997, the TNG Telescope is int its Commissioning phase. In this paper, we describe the structure of the control software of TNG and the on-going activity of the software integration team. The Telescope Communication Network has been completely installed, the control software has been set up and the integration phase is currently in progress. The TNG control software has been designed having in mind the needs of a modern telescope control system: it is based on stable and widespread industry standards; its architecture is fully modular and intrinsically open in order to allow future enhancements and/or modifications of its components. Moreover, the code was written paying a particular attention to its portability. All these characteristics make the TNG control system open to future technology evolutions, both hardware and software-wise. The TNG control software provides a coherent environment where the information flow is constantly guided and controlled through its path across the system. Despite the multiplicity and non-homogeneity of the different subsystems, TNG provides the operator a common framework from the raw data gathering, to the real-time applications, up to the operator interface and archiving system. This was made designing and building a set of layers of increasing abstraction that were mapped onto the various physical components. A brief description of the steps followed during the integration of a number of subsystems will be given.

The High-Level Control and Data Handling System of the Galileo Telescope

The control and archive systems for the TNG have been designed on account of the needs of a modern telescope; they are based on stable and widespread industry standards and their architecture is fully modular and intrinsically open in order to allow future enhancements and/or modifications of their components.

Distributed observing facility for remote access to multiple telescopes

The REMOT (Remote Experiment Monitoring and conTrol) project was financed by 1996 by the European Community in order to investigate the possibility of generalizing the remote access to scientific instruments. After the feasibility of this idea was demonstrated, the DYNACORE (DYNAmically, COnfigurable Remote Experiment monitoring and control) project was initiated as a REMOT follow-up. Its purpose is to develop software technology to support scientists in two different domains, astronomy and plasma physics. The resulting system allows (1) simultaneous multiple user access to different experimental facilities, (2) dynamic adaptability to different kinds of real instruments, (3) exploitation of the communication infrastructures features, (4) ease of use through intuitive graphical interfaces, and (5) additional inter-user communication using off-the-shelf projects such as video-conference tools, chat programs and shared blackboards.

Data Handling and Archiving at the Galileo Telescope

One of the most advanced features of the Galileo Telescope (TNG) is the tight connection between the control environment for the telescope and instruments and the data handling and archiving system. This specific design feature is aligned with current trends for telescopes of the new generation, such as VLT and Gemini.