LLamaTelSim

LLAMA Telescope Simulator

Acronyms

• ALMA: Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array
• LLAMA: Large Latin American Millimeter Array
• ACS: ALMA Common Software
• ACD: Antenna Calibration Device
• TMCDB: Telescope Monitoring Configuration Database

Purpose

The ALMA is a major collaboration effort between European (ESO), North American (NRAO) and East Asian countries (NAOJ), under operations on the Chilean Chajnantor plateau, at 5.000 meters of altitude. Currently, it is the largest radio-telescope on Earth, it has 66 antennas of 12-meter and 7-meter diameter, distributed over a wide extension, with up to 16 kilometers of baseline separation. ALMA has three types of 12-meters antennas: Vertex, Alcatel and Mitsubishi. The LLAMA Observatory is composed by a single-dish 12 m Nasmyth optics antenna with VLBI capability which is under construction in the Puna de Atacama desert in the Province of Salta (Argentina). The primary mirror accuracy will allow to observe from 40 GHz up to 900 GHz. LLAMA is currently in its very early stage of construction, hence real hardware has not been delivered yet. The antenna to be used in LLAMA strongly resembles the ALMA Vertex antenna currently used, plus some modifications specially done for LLAMA regarding the type of science LLAMA wants to achieve.

ALMA Software uses ACS as its main framework. ACS provides a software infrastructure common to all partners and consists of a documented collection of common patterns in and of components, which implement those patterns. The heart of ACS is based on a distributed component model, with ACS components implemented as CORBA objects in any of the supported programming languages. The teams responsible for the control system's development use ACS Components as the basis for control high level entities and for the implementation of devices such as an antenna mount control. ACS provides common CORBA-based services such as logging, error and alarm management, configuration database and lifecycle management.

The LLAMA software group has modified the current implementation of the ALMA's Vertex mount driver according to their requirements, however it needs to be tested and validated.

Objectives

PROJECT GOAL	PROJECT OBJECTIVE
1. Simulate the modified Vertex mount antenna	Check whether the changes done by Vertex build or not. Fixing it if necessary.
	Prepare a simulated local environment. Based on CentOS 5 or 6 and on latest ACS-community branch
2. Prepare configuration of the simulation deployment	Check whether TMCDB based on mySQL works or not (provided by ACS-community). Fixing it if necessary.
	Create simulation configuration and document instructions
	Copy the antenna configuration from ALMA and clean-up the unnecessary parameters.
	Adapt TMCDB-explorer to work with the mySQL deployment of TMCDB
3. BONUS TRACK	To implement a tmcdb explorer outside of ALMA software environment to be used by ACS-community
4. Final presentation	Official presentation to the ALMA Software Group.

Planning

Each project goal (1 and 2) will be treat separately, in other words, the deliverables for each goal will be:

#	Milestone/Deliverable	Planned Completion Date	Status
1	Documentation of the requirements for this project	Middle of week 2	🔴
2	Documentation of the proposed solution	End of week 3	🔴
3	Implementation of the prototype	End of week 6	🔴
4	Presentation for ADC Software Group and documentation on twiki page	End of week 8	🔴

Worklogs

###2016-01-18

1. Read documentation about ACS.
2. Install virtual machine.

###2016-01-19

1. Read document "ALMA Software Development Tools and Integration Guidelines"
2. Creation and configuration INTROOT.
3. Compilation of "ARCHIVES, ICD and CONTROL".

###2016-01-20

1. Read Document "Control Subsystem Design"

###2016-01-21

1. Read Document "Control Subsystem Design"
2. Read Document "Alma Telescope Monitor and Configuration Database"

###2016-01-22

1. Read Document "Control Subsystem Design"
2. Read Document "Alma Telescope Monitor and Configuration Database"
3. Install Llama virtual machine.

###2016-01-25

1. Convert the coordinates given by Llama to spherical coordinates.
2. Still reading documentation.

###2016-01-26

1. Simulated the antenna with llama point zero coordinates
2. Read "ALMA Telescope Monitor and Configuration Database"

###2016-01-27

1. Check the monitoring points.
2. Simulate the Antenna Mount and track different source of object.

###2016-01-28

1. Read the "Device Driver code Generation Framework".
2. Install office 2003

###2016-01-29

1. Start to edit the spreadsheet document for the M&C points.

###2016-02-01

1. Read documentation about the TMCDB.

###2016-02-03

1. Reporting requirements for the TMCDB.

###2016-02-04

1. Edit the spreadsheet document.

###2016-02-05

1. Presentation to the software team showing the progress.
2. Finish to edit the spreadsheet document.

###2016-02-08

1. ...

Links

• ICD LLAMA Vertex Antenna link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6UKXXqsUcAKWEVld3NDV0UyTkE