Software and hardware to improve a remote telescope station

Herzog, J.; Hofmann, B.; Fiedler, H.; Prohaska, M.; Schildknecht, T. (2021). Software and hardware to improve a remote telescope station. In: 8th European Conference on Space Debris. Darmstadt, Deutschland. 20. April 2021 - 23. April 2021.

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The telescope network SMARTnet, established and op-erated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in closecooperation with the Astronomical Institute of the Uni-versity of Bern (AIUB), is conceptualised to collect anddistribute data from telescope stations. Contributing sta-tions owned and operated by DLR are running remotelyand autonomously. When there is no regular personnel athand, operational tasks include supervising hardware andsoftware states as well as the environmental conditions.The decision in favour of or against performing observa-tions is made by the software alone and shall be basedon well-defined criteria. A decision in favour of observa-tions may be revoked any time in the event of changingconditions. Especially in case of declining weather con-ditions, observations have to be stopped immediately toprevent hardware damage. Furthermore, the set-up hasto be failsafe to shut down observations and station hard-ware in cases of emergency, e.g. power failures or domeerrors. Error handling is thus a key element. If com-ponents do not receive or send answers within a reason-able time frame, observations shall be stopped or the errormay be solved by the software itself.For DLR’s stations within SMARTnet, the main super-vision is based on two computers running in a master-slave configuration. Only the computer in the role of themaster is commanding the stations despite of both beingindividually capable of it. This redundancy is fundamen-tal, and all other hardware components were integratedaround this concept. Both computers are checking eachother’s reachability via network connection permanently.The computer in the role of the master is checking contin-uously the status of the station components, the environ-mental conditions, the observations, and the image pro-cessing. The software for controlling the telescope andfor processing the acquired images is part of a softwarepackage which had already been developed by AIUB. Wewill show how these software modules are incorporatedinto the station’s software. Due to DLR’s network se-curity policy, a contact from any stations’ computer tothe DLR network is not allowed, disabling possibilities togain ill-intended access to DLR’s high-security projects.Therefore, a superordinate layer of software monitoringeach station was established and is located at DLR. Wewill primarily focus on the stations’ software and explainthe superordinate layer in cases where the communica-tion to the station is involved.In this paper, we will describe adaptations of hardwarecomponents and the optimisation of the stations’ softwareafter the start of operation in April 2017. This descriptionwill focus on improvements which were made in order tostabilise operations. To put the improvements into con-text, we will give a condensed overview of the prototypeand demonstrator versions, which were already addressedin earlier publications. Subsequently, we will set up sce-narios, in which different problems occur after the inau-guration in 2017, some hindering observations, some al-lowing for continuation. We will describe how the systemis reacting to ensure maximum safety for the equipmentand the steps which are taken to resolve the initially un-solved problems which occured before 2017.

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