The Joan Oró Telescope at the Montsec Astronomical Observatory (TJO - OAdM) is a small-class observatory working
under completely unattended control, due to the isolation of the site. Robotic operation is mandatory for its routine use.
The level of robotization of an observatory is given by its reliability in responding to environment changes and by the
required human interaction due to possible alarms. These two points establish a level of human attendance to ensure low
risk at any time. But there is another key point when deciding how the system performs as a robot: the capability to adapt
the scheduled observation to actual conditions. The scheduler represents a fundamental element to fully achieve an
intelligent response at any time. Its main task is the mid- and short-term time optimization and it has a direct effect on
the scientific return achieved by the observatory. We present a description of the scheduler developed for the TJO -
OAdM, which is separated in two parts. Firstly, a pre-scheduler that makes a temporary selection of objects from the
available projects according to their possibility of observation. This process is carried out before the beginning of the
night following different selection criteria. Secondly, a dynamic scheduler that is executed any time a target observation
is complete and a new one must be scheduled. The latter enables the selection of the best target in real time according to
actual environment conditions and the set of priorities.
The Telescope Joan Oró at the Montsec Astronomical Observatory (TJO - OAdM) is a small-class observatory working
in completely unattended control. There are key problems to solve when a robotic control is envisaged, both on hardware
and software issues. We present the OpenROCS (ROCS stands for Robotic Observatory Control System), an open source
platform developed for the robotic control of the TJO - OAdM and similar astronomical observatories. It is a complex
software architecture, composed of several applications for hardware control, event handling, environment monitoring,
target scheduling, image reduction pipeline, etc. The code is developed in Java, C++, Python and Perl. The software
infrastructure used is based on the Internet Communications Engine (Ice), an object-oriented middleware that provides
object-oriented remote procedure call, grid computing, and publish/subscribe functionality. We also describe the
subsystem in charge of the dome control: several hardware and software elements developed to specially protect the
system at this identified single point of failure. It integrates a redundant control and a rain detector signal for alarm
triggering and it responds autonomously in case communication with any of the control elements is lost (watchdog
functionality). The self-developed control software suite (OpenROCS) and dome control system have proven to be
highly reliable.
CARMENES (Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exo-earths with Near-infrared and optical
Echelle Spectrographs) is a next-generation instrument to be built for the 3.5m telescope at the Calar Alto
Observatory by a consortium of Spanish and German institutions. Conducting a five-year exoplanet survey
targeting ~ 300 M stars with the completed instrument is an integral part of the project. The CARMENES
instrument consists of two separate spectrographs covering the wavelength range from 0.52 to 1.7 μm at a spectral
resolution of R = 85, 000, fed by fibers from the Cassegrain focus of the telescope. The spectrographs are housed
in a temperature-stabilized environment in vacuum tanks, to enable a 1m/s radial velocity precision employing
a simultaneous ThAr calibration.
The Montsec Astronomical Observatory (OAdM) is a small-class observatory working on a completely unattended
control, due to the isolation of the site. Robotic operation is, then, mandatory for its routine use. The level of
robotization of an observatory is given by the confidence reached to respond to environment changes and by the
required human interaction due to possible alarms. These two points establish a level of human attendance to
ensure low risk at any time. There are key problems to solve when a robotic control is envisaged. Learned lessons
and solutions to these issues at the OAdM are discussed here. We present a description of the general control
software (SW) and several SW packages developed. The general control SW specially protects the system at the
identified single points of failure and makes a distributed control of any subsystem, which are able to respond
independently when an alarm is triggered on thanks to a top-down control flow. Specific SW packages developed
are: an environment monitoring SW, a set of alarm routines, a pipeline for calibration and analysis of the
images taken, and an observation scheduler. All together compose a SW suite designed to reach the complete
robotization of an observatory.
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