Prof. Joel A. Eaton Profile

Prof. Joel A. Eaton

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Proceedings Article | 27 June 2006 Paper

Project management at a university

Joel Eaton

Proceedings Volume 6271, 627105 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.669722

KEYWORDS: Telescopes, Stars, Observatories, Spectrographs, Systems engineering, Mirrors, Spectroscopy, Space telescopes, Astronomy, Photometry

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Managing instrumentation projects, large or small, involves a number of common challenges-defining what is needed, desiging a system to provide it, producing it in an economical way, and putting it into service expeditiously. Doing these things in a university environoment provides unique challenges and opportunities not obtaining in the environment of large projects at NASA or national labs. I address this topic from the viewpoint of knowledge of two such projects, the development of OAO-2 at the University of Wisconsin and the relocation of Fairborn Observatory to the Patagonia Mountains in Arizona, as well as my own developemnt of the Tennessee State 2-m Automatic Spectroscopic Telescope. For the university environment, I argue for a more traditional management style that relies on more informal techniques than those used in large-scale projects conducted by big bureaucratic institutions. This style identifies what tasks are really necessary and eliminates as much wasteful overhead as possible. I discuss many of the formalities used in project management, such as formal reviews (PDR, CDR, etc.) and Gantt charts, and propose other ways of acheving the same results more effectively. The university environment acutely requires getting the right people to do the project, both in terms of their individual personalities, motivation, and technical skills but also in terms of their ability to get on with one another. Two critical challenges confronting those doing such projects in universities are 1) keeping the contractors on task (the major challenge to anyone doing project management) and 2) dealing with the purchasing systems in such institutions.

Proceedings Article | 15 September 2004 Paper

Control of the TSU 2-m automatic telescope

Joel Eaton, Michael Williamson

Proceedings Volume 5496, (2004) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.549451

KEYWORDS: Telescopes, Computing systems, Spectrographs, Stars, Observatories, Control systems, Space telescopes, Process control, Cameras, Motion controllers

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Tennessee State University is operating a 2-m automatic telescope for high-dispersion spectroscopy. The alt-azimuth telescope is fiber-coupled to a conventional echelle spectrograph with two resolutions (R=30,000 and 70,000). We control this instrument with four computers running linux and communicating over ethernet through the UDP protocol. A computer physically located on the telescope handles the acquisition and tracking of stars. We avoid the need for real-time programming in this application by periodically latching the positions of the axes in a commercial motion controller and the time in a GPS receiver. A second (spectrograph) computer sets up the spectrograph and runs its CCD, a third (roof) computer controls the roll-off roof and front flap of the telescope enclosure, and the fourth (executive) computer makes decisions about which stars to observe and when to close the observatory for bad weather. The only human intervention in the telescope's operation involves changing the observing program, copying data back to TSU, and running quality-control checks on the data. It has been running reliably in this completely automatic, unattended mode for more than a year with all day-to-day adminsitration carried out over the Internet. To support automatic operation, we have written a number of useful tools to predict and analyze what the telescope does. These include a simulator that predicts roughly how the telescope will operate on a given night, a quality-control program to parse logfiles from the telescope and identify problems, and a rescheduling program that calculates new priorities to keep the frequency of observation for the various stars roughly as desired. We have also set up a database to keep track of the tens of thousands of spectra we expect to get each year.

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