Poster Abstract

P.9 Arno Schoenmakers (ASTRON)

ARTAMIS: a real-time monitor system of the WSRT based on WinCC-OA

The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) is a radio interferometer, located near the village of Westerbork in the Northern Netherlands. It consists of fourteen 25-m large dishes on a 3-km wide east-west oriented baseline. The system was built in 1970, with an extension in 1981, and has since its delivery been operating at the forefront of world-class radio astronomy. Last June, a completely new front- and backend system has been put into operations called Apertif (APERture Tile In Focus). The new system allows us to create 40 independent sightlines, or beams, using novel aperture array systems in the focus of these telescopes, which boosts the capabilities of the WSRT to conduct wide-field surveys and transient object searches.

Real-time monitoring of the hardware and observation status is crucial for operating a complex system such as the WSRT with Apertif. To that purpose, we have developed ARTAMIS, the All-Round Telescope Array Monitor and Information System, built on the Siemens WinCC-OA SCADA platform. ARTAMIS allows the WSRT operators, but also our science users, a well-organized view of the current or past status of the whole WSRT system, including VLBI and other experiments that we run next to Apertif.

In this contribution we want to present the WinCC-OA capabilities, the features that we built into the ARTAMIS system and how we have created these, and how we use this tool in the daily operations of the WSRT.