The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) is a 10.4-meter optical-infrared telescope located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, Spain. Like any modern telescope, it has a high degree of automation and complexity, being made up of hundreds of subsystems that work in a coordinated way to carry out a scientific observation. Even the control system is at a good level of maturity, on certain occasions, when an unwanted event occurs, it sometimes becomes difficult to identify its cause and thus restore the system to its nominal state efficiently. There are three pillars that can be worked on to reduce the time lost due to technical failures: reduce the frequency of occurrence, reduce the impact after the occurrence or increase the detection capacity. However, the system will never be fault-free, so it will always be necessary to develop a system that allows a diagnosis to be made. Ideally, the diagnosis should be made with the information provided by the control system itself and other services that verify the status of the platform, and therefore, with minimal interaction with the user. On the other hand, due to the great variety of faults, and the need to carry out the diagnosis as soon as possible, a voice user interface will be used, in such a way that the operator can indicate the fault that is occurring, using natural language. As a proof of concept, a subsystem diagnostic service has been developed, a thermal monitoring subsystem, a service in charge of providing thermal values of the telescope structure to build a thermal model. During the implementation of this diagnostic service, the need for changes in the software design has already been identified to include the information necessary to generate a good diagnosis, which will indicate to the operator: which part is failing, where it is located and the instruction to replace it. Consequently, it has been proven that extending it to the rest of the control system will bring immediate benefits.
CIRCE is a near-infrared (1-2.5 micron) imager (including low-resolution spectroscopy and polarimetery) in operation as a visitor instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias 10.-4m tele scope. It was built largely by graduate students and postdocs, with help from the UF Astronomy engineering group, and is funded by the University of Florida and the U.S. National Science Foundation. CIRCE is helping to fill the gap in time between GTC first light and the arrival of EMIR, and will also provide the following scientific capabilities to compliment EMIR after its arrival: high-resolution imaging, narrowband imaging, high-time-resolution photometry, polarimetry, and low-resolution spectroscopy. There are already scientific results from CIRCE, some of which we will review. Additionally, we will go over the observing modes of CIRCE, including the two additional modes that were added during a service and upgrading run in March 2016.
The Monitoring Service collects, persists and propagates the Telescope and Instrument telemetry, for the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC), an optical-infrared 10-meter segmented mirror telescope at the ORM observatory in Canary Islands (Spain). A new version of the Monitoring Service has been developed in order to improve performance, provide high availability, guarantee fault tolerance and scalability to cope with high volume of data. The architecture is based on a distributed in-memory data store with a Product/Consumer pattern design. The producer generates the data samples. The consumers either persists the samples to a database for further analysis or propagates them to the consoles in the control room to monitorize the state of the whole system.
The "Gran Telescopio Canarias" (GTC) is an optical-infrared 10-meter segmented mirror telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (ORM) observatory in Canary Islands (Spain). The GTC Control System (GCS) is continuously evolving to enhance the operational efficiency. In this work we present the new GCS subsystem to automatize the guiding setup process, both for Fast Guiding and for Slow Guiding. A set of restrictions (including vignetting and photometric computations) is used to select the stars appropriate for guiding, and a merit function is used to choose the best one. Then, the system computes the optical configuration that fits best the selected star, automatically performs the guide star acquisition process and it closes the guide loop.
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