The Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) is a 6-meter diameter telescope with a surface accuracy of 10 microns, operating at submillimeter to millimeter wavelengths. It will be located at 5600 meters elevation on Cerro Chajnantor in the Atacama desert of northern Chile overlooking the ALMA site. Its novel optical “crossed-Dragone” design will deliver a high-throughput, wide field-of-view telescope capable of mapping the sky very rapidly and efficiently. The telescope can host up to three instruments, with the heterodyne array “CHAI” and the direct-detection camera “Prime-Cam” as first-generation instruments. The often harsh environmental conditions at the telescope site require that FYST be operated remotely, either from the base station near San Pedro de Atacama or from the scientist’s home institutions in the US, Canada and Germany. Automated observations will therefore be the dominant observation mode. FYST’s Observatory Control System (OCS) gives instrument teams the responsibility to control observations. We believe that this model is a good fit for FYST because the observatory will operate exclusively in campaign mode. Furthermore, instrument teams have significant investments in software they want to preserve. The OCS adopts a micro-service design using off-theshelf components as far as possible to minimize development effort. We will present the OCS design and the selection of off-the-shelf components used.
This paper discusses the usage of LoRa wireless transmission protocol in support of CCAT-prime telescope operations in northern Chile. A LoRa based sensor network allows for low data rate sensors to be deployed with up to 1 year battery life with a broadcast range of multiple kilometers. In this paper we present the basics of a LoRa network and demonstrate its application to a vehicle tracking system as part of an observatory sensor network. We show results from a recent test campaign and demonstrate transmission ranges up to 40km. We discuss plans for future expansion and how such a system aids the remote operation of an observatory.
We describe the Short Wavelength Camera (SWCam) for the CCAT observatory including the primary science drivers, the coupling of the science drivers to the instrument requirements, the resulting implementation of the design, and its performance expectations at first light. CCAT is a 25 m submillimeter telescope planned to operate at 5600 meters, near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. CCAT is designed to give a total wave front error of 12.5 μm rms, so that combined with its high and exceptionally dry site, the facility will provide unsurpassed point source sensitivity deep into the short submillimeter bands to wavelengths as short as the 200 μm telluric window. The SWCam system consists of 7 sub-cameras that address 4 different telluric windows: 4 subcameras at 350 μm, 1 at 450 μm, 1 at 850 μm, and 1 at 2 mm wavelength. Each sub-camera has a 6’ diameter field of view, so that the total instantaneous field of view for SWCam is equivalent to a 16’ diameter circle. Each focal plane is populated with near unit filling factor arrays of Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detectors (LEKIDs) with pixels scaled to subtend an solid angle of (λ/D)2 on the sky. The total pixel count is 57,160. We expect background limited performance at each wavelength, and to be able to map < 35(°)2 of sky to 5 σ on the confusion noise at each wavelength per year with this first light instrument. Our primary science goal is to resolve the Cosmic Far-IR Background (CIRB) in our four colors so that we may explore the star and galaxy formation history of the Universe extending to within 500 million years of the Big Bang. CCAT's large and high-accuracy aperture, its fast slewing speed, use of instruments with large format arrays, and being located at a superb site enables mapping speeds of up to three orders of magnitude larger than contemporary or near future facilities and makes it uniquely sensitive, especially in the short submm bands.
CCAT will be a 25m diameter sub-millimeter telescope capable of operating in the 0.2 to 2.1mm wavelength range. It will be located at an altitude of 5600m on Cerro Chajnantor in northern Chile near the ALMA site. The anticipated first generation instruments include large format (60,000) kinetic inductance detector (KID) cameras, a large format heterodyne array and a direct detection multi-object spectrometer. The paper describes the architecture of the CCAT software and the development strategy.
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