The Simons Observatory: Alarms and Detector Quality Monitoring

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and deployment of an alarm system for the Simons Observatory, which monitors detector and hardware performance to ensure optimal operation and data quality during observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel alarm system integrated into the Observatory Control System for real-time monitoring and rapid response during the SO telescopes' commissioning.

Findings

Effective detection of hardware and data quality issues

Successful deployment during telescope commissioning

Enhanced operational reliability

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.