71 research outputs found

    The Very High Energy source catalog at the ASI Science Data Center

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    The increasing number of Very High Energy (VHE) sources discovered by the current generation of Cherenkov telescopes made particularly relevant the creation of a dedicated source catalogs as well as the cross-correlation of VHE and lower energy bands data in a multi-wavelength framework. The "TeGeV Catalog" hosted at the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC) is a catalog of VHE sources detected by ground-based Cherenkov detectors. The TeGeVcat collects all the relevant information publicly available about the observed GeV/TeV sources. The catalog contains also information about public light curves while the available spectral data are included in the ASDC SED Builder tool directly accessible from the TeGeV catalog web page. In this contribution we will report a comprehensive description of the catalog and the related tools.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures - Proceeding of the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conferenc

    ASTRI SST-2M archive system: a prototype for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

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    The ASTRI project of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) is developing, in the framework of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), an end-to-end prototype system based on a dual-mirror small-sized Cherenkov telescope. Data preservation and accessibility are guaranteed by means of the ASTRI Archive System (AAS) that is responsible for both the on-site and off-site archiving of all data produced by the different sub- systems of the so-called ASTRI SST-2M prototype. Science, calibration, and Monte Carlo data together with the dedicated Instrument Response Functions (IRFs) (and corresponding metadata) will be properly stored and organized in different branches of the archive. A dedicated technical data archive (TECH archive) will store the engineering and auxiliary data and will be organized under a parallel database system. Through the use of a physical system archive and a few logical user archives that reflect the different archive use-cases, the AAS has been designed to be independent from any specific data model and storage technology. A dedicated framework to access, browse and download the telescope data has been identified within the proposal handling utility that stores and arranges the information of the observational proposals. The development of the whole archive system follows the requirements of the CTA data archive and is currently carried out by the INAF-OAR & ASI-Science Data Center (ASDC) team. The AAS is fully adaptable and ready for the ASTRI mini-array that, formed of at least nine ASTRI SST-2M telescopes, is proposed to be installed at the CTA southern site

    ASTRI data reduction software in the framework of the Cherenkov Telescope Array

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    The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a worldwide project aimed at building the next-generation groundbased gamma-ray observatory. CTA will be composed of two arrays of telescopes of different sizes, one each in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, to achieve full-sky coverage and a ten-fold improvement in sensitivity with respect to the present-generation facilities. Within the CTA project, the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) is developing an end-to-end prototype of one of the CTA Small-Size Telescope's designs with a dual-mirror (SST-2M) Schwarzschild-Couder optics design. The prototype, named ASTRI SST-2M, is located at the INAF "M.C. Fracastoro" observing station in Serra La Nave (Mt. Etna, Sicily) and has started its verification and performance validation phase in fall 2017. A mini-array of (at least) nine ASTRI telescopes has been proposed to be deployed at the CTA southern site, during the pre-production phase, by means of a collaborative effort carried out by institutes from Italy, Brazil, and South Africa. The CTA ASTRI team has developed a complete end-to-end software package for the reduction, up to the final scientific products, of raw data acquired with ASTRI telescopes with the aim of actively contributing to the global ongoing activities for the official data handling system of the CTA observatory. The group is also undertaking a massive production of Monte Carlo simulation data using the same software chain adopted by the CTA Consortium. Both activities are also carried out in the framework of the European H2020-ASTERICS (Astronomy ESFRI and Research Infrastructure Cluster) project. In this work, we present the main components of the ASTRI data reduction software package and report the status of its development. Preliminary results on the validation of both data reduction and telescope simulation chains achieved with real data taken by the prototype and simulations are also discussed

    The On-Site Analysis of the Cherenkov Telescope Array

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    The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory will be one of the largest ground-based very high-energy gamma-ray observatories. The On-Site Analysis will be the first CTA scientific analysis of data acquired from the array of telescopes, in both northern and southern sites. The On-Site Analysis will have two pipelines: the Level-A pipeline (also known as Real-Time Analysis, RTA) and the level-B one. The RTA performs data quality monitoring and must be able to issue automated alerts on variable and transient astrophysical sources within 30 seconds from the last acquired Cherenkov event that contributes to the alert, with a sensitivity not worse than the one achieved by the final pipeline by more than a factor of 3. The Level-B Analysis has a better sensitivity (not be worse than the final one by a factor of 2) and the results should be available within 10 hours from the acquisition of the data: for this reason this analysis could be performed at the end of an observation or next morning. The latency (in particular for the RTA) and the sensitivity requirements are challenging because of the large data rate, a few GByte/s. The remote connection to the CTA candidate site with a rather limited network bandwidth makes the issue of the exported data size extremely critical and prevents any kind of processing in real-time of the data outside the site of the telescopes. For these reasons the analysis will be performed on-site with infrastructures co-located with the telescopes, with limited electrical power availability and with a reduced possibility of human intervention. This means, for example, that the on-site hardware infrastructure should have low-power consumption. A substantial effort towards the optimization of high-throughput computing service is envisioned to provide hardware and software solutions with high-throughput, low-power consumption at a low-cost.Comment: In Proceedings of the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2015), The Hague, The Netherlands. All CTA contributions at arXiv:1508.0589

    XIAO X-ray Imager for Afterglows Observations Proposta tecnico gestionale

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    SVOM e’ una missione franco-cinese dedicata alla rivelazione, localizzazione rapida, e studio dei GRB e di altre sorgenti transienti ad energie X/gamma. Si propone di partecipare alla missione SVOM contribuendo: a) al carico utile del satellite, fornendo un piccolo telescopio (XIAO), ottimizzato per la localizzazione precisa dei GRB e lo studio degli afterglow nella banda X soft b) al segmento di terra, fornendo l’utilizzo della stazione di Malindi e collaborando alla componente scientific

    A prototype for the real-time analysis of the Cherenkov Telescope Array

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    The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory will be one of the biggest ground-based very-high-energy (VHE) Îł- ray observatory. CTA will achieve a factor of 10 improvement in sensitivity from some tens of GeV to beyond 100 TeV with respect to existing telescopes. The CTA observatory will be capable of issuing alerts on variable and transient sources to maximize the scientific return. To capture these phenomena during their evolution and for effective communication to the astrophysical community, speed is crucial. This requires a system with a reliable automated trigger that can issue alerts immediately upon detection of Îł-ray flares. This will be accomplished by means of a Real-Time Analysis (RTA) pipeline, a key system of the CTA observatory. The latency and sensitivity requirements of the alarm system impose a challenge because of the anticipated large data rate, between 0.5 and 8 GB/s. As a consequence, substantial efforts toward the optimization of highthroughput computing service are envisioned. For these reasons our working group has started the development of a prototype of the Real-Time Analysis pipeline. The main goals of this prototype are to test: (i) a set of frameworks and design patterns useful for the inter-process communication between software processes running on memory; (ii) the sustainability of the foreseen CTA data rate in terms of data throughput with different hardware (e.g. accelerators) and software configurations, (iii) the reuse of nonreal- time algorithms or how much we need to simplify algorithms to be compliant with CTA requirements, (iv) interface issues between the different CTA systems. In this work we focus on goals (i) and (ii)

    The High-Level Interface Definitions in the ASTRI/CTA Mini Array Software System (MASS)

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    ASTRI (Astrofisica con Specchi a Tecnologia Replicante Italiana) is a Flagship Project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, and led by INAF, the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics. Within this framework, INAF is currently developing an end-to-end prototype, named ASTRI SST-2M, of a Small Size Dual-Mirror Telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array, CTA. A second goal of the project is the realization of the ASTRI/CTA mini-array, which will be composed of seven SST-2M telescopes placed at the CTA Southern Site. The ASTRI Mini Array Software System (MASS) is designed to support the ASTRI/CTA mini-array operations. MASS is being built on top of the ALMA Common Software (ACS) framework, which provides support for the implementation of distributed data acquisition and control systems, and functionality for log and alarm management, message driven communication and hardware devices management. The first version of the MASS system, which will comply with the CTA requirements and guidelines, will be tested on the ASTRI SST-2M prototype. In this contribution we present the interface definitions of the MASS high level components in charge of the ASTRI SST-2M observation scheduling, telescope control and monitoring, and data taking. Particular emphasis is given to their potential reuse for the ASTRI/CTA mini-array
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