Development of distributed real time data acquisition system for radio telescope monitoring

Abstract

One of the most important issues in radio astronomy is data acquisition, ensuring reliable and accurate data processing and information storage for monitoring the complex radio telescope control process. Failures arising in such control process give a significant impact for the entire space data collection system. In order to ensure a continuous monitoring, system performance, increase reliability and accuracy, it is necessary to distribute the system into several independent parts, which in case of failure are able to complement each other and at the same time independently solve a common problem. A distributed real-time data acquisition system is very important when it is needed to connect multiple devices. Moreover, the reliability of the system consisting of divided modules is increased because the failure of one module is limited to the specific functionality. The aim of this work is to propose a conceptual model for developing distributed real-time data acquisition system for radio telescope monitoring. The main advantage of such distributed data acquisition system is that the system can be extended and improved according to the needs. The distributed real-time data collection system model was designed using LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control (DSC) Module. The system allows real-time monitoring and visual data representation. All collected data is stored in the distributed system database which might be accessed remotely using cloud technology. The paper presents the results that have been obtained in the laboratory using the sensor network as a simulation of the radio telescope. The system analysis showed that the system could be adapted to the radio telescope RT-16 located in Irbene (Latvia).