The COVID-19 pandemic forced some ALMA Observatory’s teams to change their working models from observatory on-site or office-based to fully remote. The performance results obtained by the groups during this emergency evidenced that a hybrid working model would be suitable to be implemented in the long term, especially for the teams that concentrate their activities out of the observatory site or Santiago’s offices. Science and computing groups were the most suitable teams for adopting a different working model. There were many lessons learned from this experience which contributed to establishing a permanent hybrid model. The ALMA Software group, consisting of 18 engineers, transitioned in this direction taking into consideration all the knowledge learned during the pandemic and developing a smooth and successful experience by maintaining productivity levels and cohesive team spirit despite the physical location of the group members. This paper provides an overview of key considerations, challenges, and benefits associated with the shift towards a hybrid working model. Factors/challenges such as technological infrastructure, communication and collaboration, collaborators' well-being and performance metrics are analyzed from the manager/supervisors' point of view. The paper also describes the challenges that the group will face shortly, and the actions developed to mitigate the risks and disadvantages of the new working environment.
ALMA has been operating since 2013 and it keeps on adding an ever-growing new set of capabilities. Every new feature implies among other things a new software release that has to be implemented, tested and deployed around the world. In this paper we present the new deployment process that allowed ALMA to deliver faster releases to reliable testing and production environments. This was achieved through the use of container-based services, both for applications and data. This implied that tasks that in the past were done manually, are now fully automated, in order to avoid human errors and maintain consistency between what was tested and what is finally installed in production. All this, under a unique and complex operation environment that includes the two main operation facilities in Chile at ALMA Operation Site Facilities (OSF) and Santiago Central Office (SCO), and the different executive headquarters located across the ALMA global network. We also explain how we managed to address the issue of ever-growing observational data, which made it difficult to replicate the production environment data into our testing infrastructure. Our solution consisted in using a container-based database that allowed us to create a full copy of the production database in a very short time. All those changes enabled JAO to improve its software testing process allowing a monthly release cycle.
The Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph (MOONS) will cover the Very Large Telescope's (VLT) field of view with 1000 fibres. The fibres will be mounted on fibre positioning units (FPU) implemented as two-DOF robot arms to ensure a homogeneous coverage of the 500 square arcmin field of view. To accurately and fast determine the position of the 1000 fibres a metrology system has been designed. This paper presents the hardware and software design and performance of the metrology system. The metrology system is based on the analysis of images taken by a circular array of 12 cameras located close to the VLTs derotator ring around the Nasmyth focus. The system includes 24 individually adjustable lamps. The fibre positions are measured through dedicated metrology targets mounted on top of the FPUs and fiducial markers connected to the FPU support plate which are imaged at the same time. A flexible pipeline based on VLT standards is used to process the images. The position accuracy was determined to ~5 μm in the central region of the images. Including the outer regions the overall positioning accuracy is ~25 μm. The MOONS metrology system is fully set up with a working prototype. The results in parts of the images are already excellent. By using upcoming hardware and improving the calibration it is expected to fulfil the accuracy requirement over the complete field of view for all metrology cameras.
As we all know too well, building up a collaborative community around a software infrastructure is not easy. Besides recruiting enthusiasts to work as part of it, mostly for free, to succeed you also need to overcome a number of technical, sociological, and, to our surprise, some political hurdles. The ALMA Common Software (ACS) was developed at ESO and partner institutions over the course of more than 10 years. While it was mainly intended for the ALMA Observatory, it was early on thought as a generic distributed control framework. ACS has been periodically released to the public through an LGPL license, which encouraged around a dozen non-ALMA institutions to make use of ACS for both industrial and educational applications. In recent years, the Cherenkov Telescope Array and the LLAMA Observatory have also decided to adopt the framework for their own control systems. The aim of the “ACS Community” is to support independent initiatives in making use of the ACS framework and to further contribute to its development. The Community provides access to a growing network of volunteers eager to develop ACS in areas that are not necessarily in ALMA's interests, and/or were not within the original system scope. Current examples are: support for additional OS platforms, extension of supported hardware interfaces, a public code repository and a build farm. The ACS Community makes use of existing collaborations with Chilean and Brazilian universities, reaching out to promising engineers in the making. At the same time, projects actively using ACS have committed valuable resources to assist the Community's work. Well established training programs like the ACS Workshops are also being continued through the Community's work. This paper aims to give a detailed account of the ongoing (second) journey towards establishing a world-wide open source collaboration around ACS. The ACS Community is growing into a horizontal partnership across a decentralized and diversified group of actors, and we are excited about its technical and human potential.
Jonathan Antognini, Mauricio Solar, Jorge Ibsen, Mauricio Araya, Lars Nyman, Diego Mardones, Camilo Valenzuela, Patricio Ramirez, Christopher Fernandez, Mario Garces
KEYWORDS: Observatories, Astronomy, Data modeling, Visible radiation, Space telescopes, Infrared telescopes, Astronomical telescopes, Ultraviolet radiation, Data centers, Data storage
The success of an observatory is usually measured by its impact in the scientific community, so a common objective is to provide transparent ways to access the generated data. The Chilean Virtual Observatory (ChiVO), started working in the implementation of a prototype, in collaboration with ALMA, considering the current needs of the Chilean astronomical community, in addition to the protocols and standards of IVOA, and the comparison of different existing data access toolkit services. Based on this efforts, a VO prototype was designed and implemented for the ALMA large scale of data.
The Virtual Observatories strive to interoperate, exchange data and share services as if it was only one big VO. In this work, the state of the art of VOs will be presented and summarized in a schematic diagram with the frequency range of the observed data that every VO publishes. Chile, currently a member of the IVOA, collaborates with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), to study and propose ways to adequate the data generated by ALMA to the
different data model proposed by the IVOA.
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