SARAO, Cape Town, South Africa
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.
