Würzburg 2018 – scientific programme
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 30: Gammaastronomie I
T 30.4: Talk
Tuesday, March 20, 2018, 17:20–17:35, Philo-HS7
FACT - Robotic Monitoring at TeV Energies — •Dominik Neise1 and Maximilian Nöthe2 for the FACT collaboration — 1ETH Zürich, Zürich, Schweiz — 2Technische Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, Deutschland
The FACT (First G-APD Cherenkov Telescope) can perform its scientific task of monitoring bright gamma-ray sources almost without any human interaction.
After first light in October 2011, FACT has been operated remotely since summer 2012. The need for manual interaction has been successively reduced to the point where FACT is now running robotic. In case of any problem, phone calls to experts are initiated automatically.
This automation results in high duty cycle as well as very fast reaction on flaring events. FACT is contributing to multi-wavelength and multi-messenger studies both as triggering and follow-up instrument. In follow-ups it can often provide unique information as - unlike other instruments - being able to observe during full moon. Based on an automatic quick-look analysis, the FACT collaboration sends automatically alerts to the multi-messenger network AMON and triggers target-of-opportunity (ToO) observations of satellites, as e.g. INTEGRAL, Swift, Astrosat, in the context of ToO proposals.
Interaction of experts is necessary for those cases where webforms have to be filled manually to initiate ToO observations of other instruments. In the presentation, we will discuss the implementation of the robotic system and special caveats to be taken into account.