COSMOdern: An HST COS Monitoring System for the Contemporary
Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), while also a research institution, is first and foremost an operations institution. Currently, STScI is responsible to some extent for telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the upcoming James Webb Space and Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescopes, as well community outreach efforts such as the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes and development of the astropy package. One of the major responsibilities of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) Instrument team is monitoring the health and performance of the instrument and telescope, which is imperative in the calibration and upkeep of the instrument. Since COS was installed on HST in 2009, there have been iterations of monitoring initiatives, all of which have been unstable to some degree, not future conscious, and eventually, in need of replacement. In our most recent monitoring initiative, we have made strides in developing a new system with an emphasis on modernizing and stabilizing the system, while looking forward to ensure the system continues to operate as long as COS does. This new system emphasizes modernity by following best Python software practices; the system is open source and community visible, follows both internal STScI style standards and PEP standards, is version controlled, regression and build tested, and documented. Additionally, we make use of modern Python tools and packages such as interactive visualization with plotly, employing a SQL database backend with the peewee ORM, and parallelizing computations with dask.
