5 research outputs found
The GRAVITY instrument software / High-level software
GRAVITY is the four-beam, near- infrared, AO-assisted, fringe tracking,
astrometric and imaging instrument for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer
(VLTI). It is requiring the development of one of the most complex instrument
software systems ever built for an ESO instrument. Apart from its many
interfaces and interdependencies, one of the most challenging aspects is the
overall performance and stability of this complex system. The three infrared
detectors and the fast reflective memory network (RMN) recorder contribute a
total data rate of up to 20 MiB/s accumulating to a maximum of 250 GiB of data
per night. The detectors, the two instrument Local Control Units (LCUs) as well
as the five LCUs running applications under TAC (Tools for Advanced Control)
architecture, are interconnected with fast Ethernet, RMN fibers and dedicated
fiber connections as well as signals for the time synchronization. Here we give
a simplified overview of all subsystems of GRAVITY and their interfaces and
discuss two examples of high-level applications during observations: the
acquisition procedure and the gathering and merging of data to the final FITS
file.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, published in Proc. SPIE 9146, Optical and
Infrared Interferometry IV, 91462
VLTI status update: a decade of operations and beyond
We present the latest update of the European Southern Observatory's Very
Large Telescope interferometer (VLTI). The operations of VLTI have greatly
improved in the past years: reduction of the execution time; better offering of
telescopes configurations; improvements on AMBER limiting magnitudes; study of
polarization effects and control for single mode fibres; fringe tracking real
time data, etc. We present some of these improvements and also quantify the
operational improvements using a performance metric. We take the opportunity of
the first decade of operations to reflect on the VLTI community which is
analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we present briefly the
preparatory work for the arrival of the second generation instruments GRAVITY
and MATISSE.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of the SPIE, 9146-1