Münster 2017 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 35: Gammaastronomie 2

T 35.4: Talk

Tuesday, March 28, 2017, 11:45–12:00, H 2

FACT -- Towards Robotic Operation — •Maximilian Nöthe¹ and Dominik Neise² for the FACT collaboration — ¹TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Deutschland — ²ETH Zürich, Zürich, Schweiz

Situated on the Canary Island of La Palma at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, the First G-APD Cherenkov Telescope (FACT) continuously monitors bright gamma-ray sources.

IACTs usually need a crew of two to five shifters on site to operate. One of the major goals of the FACT collaboration is robotic operation. Since first light in October 2011, great progress has been made towards this goal. A first step, remote operation without shifters on site, was implemented in summer 2012. Since then, streamlined web interfaces replaced more complicated or unreliable ones via ssh or VNC and VNP. At this point, shifters were only required to startup the telescope in the evening, shut it down in the morning and monitor telescope state and environmental conditions in between. These efforts lead to a data taking efficiency of ~95 % and a total of over 2300 hours of physics data in the past twelve months.

In this talk, the current effort to go to full robotic operation will be presented. A new software was introduced, to go to a mode of operation where the telescope takes data completely on its own, only notifying a shifter if and when human interaction is necessary. It can reach to a shifter via phone, text messages and even send plots and images. The software continuously monitors the telescope status, environmental conditions and quick look analysis results.