On September 23, the CTAO ACADA Collaboration achieved yet another milestone when the CTAO Central Organisation officially approved and closed out the Critical Design Review (CDR) of the Array Control and Data Acquisition (ACADA) system. The approval of the CDR, an in-depth evaluation to ensure the system design meets all the requirements of the Observatory, marks a new phase in the project, moving from testing to integrating the advanced software packages that will operate the arrays.
The ACADA system includes all the software responsible for the supervision and control of telescopes and calibration instruments at both CTAO array sites. The system ensures that the execution of the astronomical observations is accurate and efficient, managing the data acquisition and compression of the raw data, handling science alerts to automatically rearrange the observation schedule and to inform other observatories of interesting gamma-ray events, and providing the user interface for the site operators and astronomers. Thus, as an orchestra director guides the different instrumentalists to produce music, the ACADA software controls a great variety of sub-systems to make the telescopes and support instruments operate together harmoniously to allow the data to flow.
Developing such a complex system requires many steps or “releases.” Getting to this point with ACADA, alone, has been the result of around 40 people from 10 institutes from six countries working together over the past 4-5 years to prepare and test the software to ensure it is ready to be used by the CTAO. To evaluate the first release, members of the ACADA Collaboration traveled to the CTAO-North site in La Palma, Spain, in September-October 2023 to carry out two separate integration campaigns with the Large-Sized Telescope (LST) prototype or LST-1, in cooperation with LST Collaboration experts. The campaigns, documented in a series of interviews, were a complete success, exhibiting that the system could operate a telescope as expected and allowing researchers to identify and solve minor issues. The results of this integration were also considered during the evaluation of the CDR as a proof-of-concept for the implementation of the system’s design.
During the CDR, initiated in October 2023, a panel of internal and external experts identified two main tasks that needed to be completed to fulfill the review objectives, as well as other recommendations for improvement. By successfully addressing the issues, the CDR was approved and closed in September this year.
With this important step achieved, the ACADA Collaboration will now keep working on the implementation of the successive releases of the software, preparing for its integration with multiple telescopes and other instrumentation on both array sites for the eventual acceptance of the full system by the Central Organisation.
Congratulations to the ACADA Collaboration on this significant milestone!