Poster Abstract

P.14 Jesus Salgado (ESA/ESAC)

Enabling telescopes coordinated observations using standards

In the latest years, the creation of coordinated observations using different telescopes is increasing on interest, allowing new science use cases and discoveries of great relevance. On many relevant science areas like multi-waveleght astronomy, transient data or the follow-up of gravitational waves, multi-messenger astrophysics is crucial.

However, one of the main problems to create coordinated observations plans between heterogeneous telescopes with different wavelength coverages, space or ground based facilities and with totally different technical properties is the lack of standards that allow users fast discovery of metadata and scheduling in a transparent way and without expert knowledge on the telescope itself.

We will present the efforts on the standardisation of the two first steps on any coordinated observations: target visibility (Object Visibility Simple Access Protocol) and scheduled observations discovery (Observation Locator Table Access Protocol).
Using these IVOA standards that we are defining, a scientist can discovery possible observation periods when a certain astronomical target is visible for different telescopes, identify coordinated observations, discover scheduled observations and to follow-up changes in the scheduling plan. We will also present services and clients implementing these protocols to show them in action.

Finally, we will review future possible standards that could be defined to facilitate all the rest of the steps of the coordinated observations proposals, from the scientific idea to the final observation.