The Simons Observatory: Alarms and Detector Quality Monitoring

Abstract

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a group of modern telescopes dedicated to observing the polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB), transients, and more. The Observatory consists of four telescopes and instruments, with over 60,000 superconducting detectors in total, located at ~5,200 m altitude in the Atacama Desert of Chile. During observations, it is important to ensure the detectors, telescope platforms, calibration and receiver hardware, and site hardware are within operational bounds. To facilitate rapid response when problems arise with any part of the system, it is essential that alerts are generated and distributed to appropriate personnel if components exceed these bounds. Similarly, alerts are generated if the quality of the data has become degraded. In this paper, we describe the SO alarm system we developed within the larger Observatory Control System (OCS) framework, including the data sources, alert architecture, and implementation. We also present results from deploying the alarm system during the commissioning of the SO telescopes and receivers.

arXiv comment14 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. To be presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2024

References in corpus (5)

• The Simons Observatory microwave SQUID multiplexing detector module design
• The Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope Receiver
• The bispectrum of polarized galactic foregrounds
• The Simons Observatory: Modeling Optical Systematics in the Large Aperture Telescope
• SLAC Microresonator Radio Frequency (SMuRF) Electronics for Read Out of Frequency-Division-Multiplexed Cryogenic Sensors