The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 1 Grid-Integration of Robotic Telescopes Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics Trieste 23 th April 2007 Frank Breitling A strophysikalisches I nstitut P otsdam (AIP)

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 2 Overview ● Introduction ● Robotic Telescopes of the AIP ● Components for the Integration ● Metadata Management ● Summary

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 3 Introduction: Astrophysical Institute Potsdam ● located in Potsdam ca. 30km west of Berlin, Germany, near the Schloßpark Babelsberg ● old institute with a long tradit-ion - founded as the “Berliner Sternwarte” in 1711 ● still edits the worlds oldest astronomical journal that is still being published (1821) ● involved in many international projects (e.g. LBT, LOFAR, ICE-T, RAVE, PEPSI, PMAS, XMM- Newton, AstroGrid-D) ● more info at

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 4 Introduction: The AstroGrid-D Project ● AstroGrid-D is – the name of the German Astronomy Community Grid grid.org/ – a collaboration of 14 German institutes under the leadership of the AIP. – funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research – part of the D-Grid ● AstroGrid-D pursues the – development of a network of – robotic telescopes – using grid technology.

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 5 ● access to the entire sky at any time, without limitations of daytimes or the weather, important for e.g. – monitoring of periodic events (e.g. stellar pulsation, search for extrasolar planets) – continuous monitoring of transient objects (e.g. GRBs) – multiwavelength observations ● provides immediate reaction – important for monitoring of transient object (e.g. GRBs) ● eases the operation through – standard interfaces for the operation – standard access to the data – reduced administrative barriers Introduction: Why a network of telescopes?

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 6 Introduction: Why robotic telescopes? ● achieve optimal usage of the available observation time (no loss of time due to human failure) ● reduce costs of operation (e.g. no travel expenses, salary) ● operation at far and hostile sites becomes possible (e.g. Antarctica like ICE-T, mountain, desserts, islands) ● remote control of telescopes is possible ● more and more robotic telescopes become available at reduced costs

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 7 Useful components have already been developed: ● Virtual organization (VO) management ● Resource management ● Job management ● Data management ● Metadata management Introduction: Why grid technology?

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 8 Robotic telescopes:Robotel ● AIP, Potsdam, Germany (80m asl) ● 0.8m telescope ● CCD Camera for imaging and photometry ● Objectives – Education, 50% of observation time is dedicated to schools and universities – Testing of new instruments, software and methods for Stella-I & Stella-II ● developed, owned and operated by the AIP! Robotel in its dome at the AIP

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 9 Robotic telescopes:Stella-I & Stella-II ● Teide Observatory, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain (2480m asl) ● Two 1.2m telescopes ● Instruments – Spectrograph – Imaging photometer ● Scientific Objectives – Doppler imaging – Search for extrasolar planets – Spectroscopic surveys – Simultaneous observations with larger facilities ● developed, owned and operated by the AIP! Stella-I and Stella-II at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife. The shelter is opened as for observation.

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 10 Robotic telescopes: Wolfgang & Amadeus ● Fairborn Observatory*, Patagonia, Arizona, USA, (1600m asl) ● Two 0.75m telescopes ● Photoelectric photometry ● Scientific Objectives – study variability timescale and life time of starspots, i.e. photometric long-term monitoring of stars over years – Support other observations ● operated by the AIP! Fairborn observatory, building 2 with open roof showing telescopes T5 (background) through T8 (foreground). *The Fairborn Observatory is a non-profit corporation dedicated to advancement of automated astronomy (

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 11 Sequencer Scheduler CCD Spectrogra ph AdapterTelescope sequence definition object database command templates target commands to physical devices via TCP/IP or RMI target description Robotic telescopes: Stella Control System The Stella Control System (SCS) ● is used for Stella-I & II and Robotel ● developed at the AIP (T. Granzer) ● is a Java-RMI based controller software ● has an interactive and automatic operation mode ● has simulation mode for testing and development (e.g. of the grid- integration)

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 12 Workstation Globus Toolkit Workstation Globus Toolkit SC S R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et Telescope Server Globus Toolkit Telescope Server Globus Toolkit R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et Robotel AIP Observer's Office Information Server Stellaris Information Server Stellaris Computer Center SPAR QL Data SPAR QL Data RDF Metad ata RDF Metad ata RDF Metad ata Components for the Integration: Architecture globusrun-ws RDF Metad ata RDF Metad ata

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 13 Components for the Integration: Architecture Scheduler Server Globus Toolkit Scheduler Server Globus Toolkit SC S R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et Telescope Server Globus Toolkit Telescope Server Globus Toolkit R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et R T M L ta rg et Robotel AIP Observer's Office Information Server Stellaris Information Server Stellaris Computer Center SPAR QL Data SPAR QL Data RDF Metad ata RDF Metad ata RDF Metad ata RDF Metad ata RDF Metad ata Extension to a Network by - introducing a scheduler - adding more telescopes globusrun-ws

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 14 Components for the Integration: Middleware which provides ● Job management: – WS GRAM (Grid Resource and Allocation Manager) with web service interface through endpoint reference (EPR) – An elementary set of grid commands for the job management, interactive access to resources and file transfer (globusrun-ws -submit / -status / -cancle, gsissh, gsiftp) ● Resource monitoring ● Virtual Organization (VO) management which is adapted by the AIP (VOMRS)

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 15 Components for the Integration: RTML Remote Telescope Markup Language (RTML) ● XML format defined through RMTL schema: sw.gwdg.de/XMLSchema/RTML/schemas/RTML-nightly.xsd ● provides description of elementary static and dynamic metadata (e.g. telescope hardware, setup and status, source catalogs, observation requests, observation history, schedules, weather information) ● standard defined by the Heterogeneous Telescope Network (HTN) ● ● adopted in AstroGrid-D

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 16 Metadata Management: Informations Service Stellaris ● development of AstroGrid-D by the ZIB (M. Högqvist) ● available at (Apache License) ● is used by AstroGrid-D for – grid resource monitoring (e.g. compute resources, telescopes) – job monitoring ● tested and runs stable ● metadata is exchanged and stored in RDF

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 17 Metadata Management: RDF RDF (Resource Description Framework) ● standard for storing of information ● is based on graph theory ● it presents information in triples ● as ● different formats exist – RDF/XML (W3C recommendation) – Notation 3 (N3) (W3C specification) ● is a development of the semantic web ● the SPARQL query language exists for retrieval of RDF information Subje ct Object Predicate

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 18 Metadata Management: RDF graph ● example of a partial RDF graph ● represents the location information of Stella-I (static metadata) Obtained with W3C RDF Validation Service (

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 19 Metadata Management: XSLT for Stellaris a conversion from RTML documents into RDF required ● developed an XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) at AIP ● can transform arbitrary XML files into RDF/XML format (e.g. RTML) ● usage very simple, only two command line programs – xsltproc – cURL for uploading to Stellaris ● available at (Apache License)

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 20 Metadata Management: SPARQL SPARQL Query Language for RDF (W3C working draft) ● is the counterpart for RDF for retrieving information ● simple syntax for selected and sorted retrieval of information ● Perl modules exist for the integration into Perl scripts ● SPARQL web browser interface is implemented into Stellaris for a quick lookup of information The Stellaris SPARQL query interface for a web bowser. The SPARQL query retrieves the geographic location of all available telescopes sorted by their altitude.

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 21 Metadata Management: Telescope Map Web browser user interface ● Developed in AstroGrid-D by the ZIB (M. Högqvist) and AIP (F. Breitling) ● for access and display of telescope metadata ● Based on Google Maps and SPARQL ● available at grid.org/ (Apache License) grid.org/

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 22 Metadata Management: Job Monitoring Web browser user interface ● Developed in AstroGrid-D by the ZIB (M. Högqvist) & AIP (F. Breitling) ● currently used to display job-state metadata ● Based on „Simile“ Timeline – like Google Maps for time-based information – a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. – ● available at (Apache License)

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 23 Summary: Achievements ● Five robotic telescopes are available to the AIP ● An architecture for the grid integration has been developed ● Metadata management has made progress – Information service has been developed – Metadata of telescope resources and observations can be provided – User interfaces are available for accessing the metadata ● The job management using the Globus WS GRAM is under development using a the Stella Control System in Simulation mode

The Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, Workshop on Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid Integration of Robotic Telescopes Frank Breitling 24 Summary: Next steps ● Providing of dynamic metadata of e.g. telescope states, weather information, recorded data, observation history ● Develope versatile scheduler which uses – static metadata, e.g. capabilities of telescopes, location – dynamic metadata, e.g. weather information, target visibilities, observation schedules – metadata of other telescopes ● simulation and testing of a network ● first observations ● proof that a network of robotic telescopes can be a very powerful instrument