PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | September 24, 2012
Proc. SPIE. 8451, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy II
KEYWORDS: Human-machine interfaces, Observatories, Telescopes, Astronomy, Computing systems, Control systems, Computer programming, Java, Computer architecture, Computer programming languages
The main telescope of the UC Observatory Santa Martina is a 50cm optical telescope donated by ESO to Pontificia
Universidad Catolica de Chile. During the past years the telescope has been refurbished and used as the main facility for
testing and validating new instruments under construction by the center of Astro-Engineering UC. As part of this work,
the need to develop a more efficient and flexible control system arises. The new distributed control system has been
developed on top of Internet Communication Engine (ICE), a framework developed by Zeroc Inc. This framework
features a lightweight but powerful and flexible inter-process communication infrastructure and provides binding to
classic and modern programming languages, such as, C/C++, java, c#, ruby-rail, objective c, etc. The result of this work
shows ICE as a real alternative for CORBA and other de-facto distribute programming framework. Classical control
software architecture has been chosen and comprises an observation control system (OCS), the orchestrator of the
observation, which controls the telescope control system (TCS), and detector control system (DCS). The real-time
control and monitoring system is deployed and running over ARM based single board computers. Other features such as
logging and configuration services have been developed as well. Inter-operation with other main astronomical control
frameworks are foreseen in order achieve a smooth integration of instruments when they will be integrated in the main
observatories in the north of Chile
