Responsive Telescope

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Clik here to view.© Jasper Annyas & Auke Klazema

Today we invite you to share in the latest success of the Radio Observatory with us, and a piece of cake. A long-standing wish of our LOFAR users has been fulfilled with the delivery of the Responsive Telescope functionality in the October software roll-out.

Our versatile telescope now reacts to external triggers, without the need of personnel in the control room and can do this faster than the manual procedure. Some checks are done (f.i. comparing the priority of the trigger to that of the current observation) and if they all comply, the current observation is aborted and the one specified in the trigger is loaded in the scheduler. There you go: LOFAR hunts for another unique event in the sky!

Apart from this important step in the LOFAR development, the RO got valuable experience delivering new software, while at the same time doing general support. This will be used in our future projects, as we want to improve and expand on our software deliveries, while at the same time keeping up our support.