Platform for Integrated Control of Telescopes (PICT)

Computational Physics, Inc. and its subcontractor Arizona Embedded Systems LLC. propose to develop the Platform for Integrated Control of Telescopes (PICT). This system is a hardware intensive system that exposes secure and robust infrastructure upon which telescope control components (hardware and software) may be installed and maintained. The system design will support deployment to any observation site identified as a requirement by USNO with a, as yet undefined, measure of reliability (e.g., mean time between failure (MTBF), percent up time, etc.).  PICT will enable: resilient secure high bandwidth remote connectivity, virtualized infrastructure, secure local networks, secure data management, onboard GPU and CPU data processing, and out-of-band administration. A unique feature of our solution is the innovative use of containerization to encapsulate the interfaces between system hardware and telescope devices as well as device to device interfaces. This allows the proposed system to support heterogeneous telescope systems with an aggregation of components (e.g., mount, dome, camera, filter wheel, etc.). Instead of trying to deploy drivers for every possible component and getting them to play nicely together on a single hardware system, we propose developing containerized infrastructure that allows one to build a collection of device images for each telescope as self-contained, tested, lightweight containers that can be deployed to the coupled telescope's hardware installation. This approach will improve integration and deployment efficiency and will ultimately help reduce time to first light for any remote optical system as well as the ability to more easily update and upgrade hardware drivers and other associated infrastructure software components. The deployed system will be maintained as a single tamper proof rack cabinet with external connections to facility provided power and ethernet network. Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) feeds will be supported to allow remote operations to maintain visual record of the hardware system as well as to support real-time visualization of the remote telescope system during operations. Support for cellular or satellite connectivity (supporting resilience gateway services) will be established on a facility by facility basis and are supported as pluggable features of the PICT system.