Developing the GOTO telescope control system

TL;DR

The paper describes the development of an autonomous control system for the GOTO telescope, enabling it to process alerts and schedule observations without human intervention, supporting future multi-site operations.

Contribution

It presents a custom robotic control system for GOTO that handles alert processing and scheduling, facilitating autonomous operations and future multi-site coordination.

Findings

Successful autonomous alert handling implemented

Scheduling system supports nightly operations

Foundation for multi-site observatory established

Abstract

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project focused on detecting optical counterparts to gravitational-wave sources. The GOTO Telescope Control System (G-TeCS) is a custom robotic control system which autonomously manages the GOTO telescope hardware and nightly operations. Since the commissioning the GOTO prototype on La Palma in 2017, development of the control system has focused on the alert handling and scheduling systems. These allow GOTO to receive and process transient alerts and then schedule and carry out observations, all without the need for human involvement. GOTO is ultimately anticipated to include multiple telescope arrays on independent mounts, both on La Palma and at a southern site in Australia. When complete these mounts will be linked to form a single multi-site observatory, requiring more advanced scheduling systems to best optimise survey and follow-up observations.