SPIE Journal Paper | 23 January 2019
KEYWORDS: Control systems, Data acquisition, Sensors, Computer architecture, Telescopes, Cameras, Data storage, Software development, Calibration, Adaptive optics
FRIDA (inFRared Imager and Dissector for Adaptive optics) is a near-infrared integral-field spectrograph operating at the wavelength range of 0.9 to 2.5 μm for use at the Nasmyth B platform of the Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC). FRIDA is a collaborative project led by the Instituto de Astronomía Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IA-UNAM, México) with the collaboration of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, Spain), Centro de Ingeniería y Desarrollo Industrial (CIDESI, México), the University of Florida (UF, USA), and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM, Spain). In imaging mode, FRIDA will provide scales of 0.010, 0.020, and 0.040 arc sec / pixel and, in IFS mode, spectral resolutions of R ∼ 1000, 4500, and 30,000. FRIDA is the first GTC instrument to use the telescope’s adaptive optics (GTCAO) system and is rescheduled to be delivered to the GTC shortly in 2020. This paper not only provides a starting point for possible future developers of GTC instruments but also presents a generic solution that we adopted in FRIDA to manage the sequences of operations and science observations. Specifically, this paper gives an overview of the high-level control software components of FRIDA. The main components are the mechanisms control system, whose primary task is to control the mechanisms of FRIDA, the data acquisition system, which interacts with the detector to take images, the data factory system, whose main tasks are to perform the reduction, storage and also to provide quality control for both engineering and scientific data, the Instrument Library (IL) component responsible for operating the devices associated with FRIDA, and the sequencer manager component responsible for the execution of both the operational sequencing of the telescope’s instruments and the observing sequences of FRIDA in close co-ordination with the GTCAO system. In other GCS instruments, the responsibilities of the sequencer manager are inside the IL representing an overload on this component with the added problems of extensibility and reusability.
