Providing Remote Access to Robotic Telescopes by Adopting Grid Technology
T. Granzer, Frank Breitling, Michael Braun, H. Enke, Thomas Röblitz · MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) · 2007
We present an architecture for enabling remote access to robotic telescopes through the adoption of Grid technology. With this architecture, Internet connected robotic telescopes form a global network and are controlled by a global resource management system (scheduler), similar to individual compute resources in a Grid. By virtualizing the access to these telescope resources and by describing them and observation requests in a generic language (RTML). Astronomers are provided with an interface to a telescope network, from which they can get the appropriate resources for their observations. Moreover, new kinds of coordinated observations become feasible, such as multi-wavelength campaigns or immediate and continuous monitoring of transient astronomical events. This paper describes the architecture, the processing of observation requests and new research topics in a global network of robotic telescopes.