JACoW is a publisher in Geneva, Switzerland that publishes the proceedings of accelerator conferences held around the world by an international collaboration of editors.
TY - CONF AU - Williams, L.P. AU - Schwartz, R.L. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - Overview of Observation Preparation and Scheduling on the MeerKAT Radio Telescope J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - The MeerKAT radio telescope performs a wide variety of scientific observations. Observation durations range from a few minutes, to many hours, and may form part of observing campaigns that span many weeks. Static observation requirements, such as resources or array configuration, may be determined and verified months in advance. Other requirements however, such as atmospheric conditions, can only be verified hours before the planned observation event. This wide variety of configuration, scheduling and control parameters are managed with features provided by the MeerKAT software. The short term scheduling functionality has expanded from simple queues to support for automatic scheduling (queuing). To support long term schedule planning, the MeerKAT telescope includes an Observation Panning Tool which provides configuration checking as well as dry-run environments that can interact with the production system. Observations are atomized to support simpler specification, facilitating machine learning projects and more flexibility in scheduling around engineering and maintenance events. This paper will provide an overview of observation specification, configuration, and scheduling on the MeerKAT telescope. The support for integration with engineering subsystems is also described. Engineering subsystems include User Supplied Equipment which are hardware and computing resources integrated to expand the MeerKAT telescope’s capabilities. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 669 EP - 672 KW - controls KW - operation KW - factory KW - MMI KW - real-time DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TUPDP072 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/tupdp072.pdf ER -