Operation, control, and data system for Antarctic Survey Telescope (AST3)

摘要

The first of the trio Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) has been deployed to Dome A, Antarctica in January2012. This largest optical survey telescope in Antarctica is equipped with a 10k × 10k CCD. The huge amount ofdata, limited satellite communication bandwidth, low temperature, low pressure and limited energy supply allplace challenges to the control and operation of the telescope. We have developed both the hardware and softwaresystems to operate the unattended telescope and carry out the survey automatically. Our systems include themain survey control, data storage, real-time pipeline, and database, for all of which we have dealt with varioustechnical difficulties. These include developing customized computer systems and data storage arrays working atthe harsh environment, temperature control for the disk arrays, automatic and fast data reduction in real-time,and building robust database system.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.