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Published July 19, 2010 | Published + Submitted
Book Section - Chapter Open

Software systems for operation, control, and monitoring of the EBEX instrument

Abstract

We present the hardware and software systems implementing autonomous operation, distributed real-time monitoring, and control for the EBEX instrument. EBEX is a NASA-funded balloon-borne microwave polarimeter designed for a 14 day Antarctic flight that circumnavigates the pole. To meet its science goals the EBEX instrument autonomously executes several tasks in parallel: it collects attitude data and maintains pointing control in order to adhere to an observing schedule; tunes and operates up to 1920 TES bolometers and 120 SQUID amplifiers controlled by as many as 30 embedded computers; coordinates and dispatches jobs across an onboard computer network to manage this detector readout system; logs over 3 GiB/hour of science and housekeeping data to an onboard disk storage array; responds to a variety of commands and exogenous events; and downlinks multiple heterogeneous data streams representing a selected subset of the total logged data. Most of the systems implementing these functions have been tested during a recent engineering flight of the payload, and have proven to meet the target requirements. The EBEX ground segment couples uplink and downlink hardware to a client-server software stack, enabling real-time monitoring and command responsibility to be distributed across the public internet or other standard computer networks. Using the emerging dirfile standard as a uniform intermediate data format, a variety of front end programs provide access to different components and views of the downlinked data products. This distributed architecture was demonstrated operating across multiple widely dispersed sites prior to and during the EBEX engineering flight.

Additional Information

© 2010 SPIE The International Society for Optical Engineering. EBEX is supported by NASA through grants number NNG04GC03G, NNG05GE62G, NNX08AG40G, and NNX07AP36H. Additional support comes from the National Science Foundation through grant number AST 0705134, the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). This project makes use of the resources of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute and of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), which is supported by the office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The McGill authors acknowledge funding from the Canadian Space Agency, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Canadian Foundation for Innovation and Canada Research Chairs program. We thank the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility for their energetic support. We gratefully acknowledge the efforts of our colleagues in the BLAST project that produced the foundation for much of this work.

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August 19, 2023
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