Software Design, Development, and Implementation for an Automated Radio Telescope

This paper presents a complete software design, development, and implementation for an automated radio telescope application. The software design consists of front-end, back-end, mobile application, control room, and virtual reality components. This software has been developed incrementally for the last four years. Each development was tested with simulated data first then with the hardware and/or with users to confirm the robustness. The software was tested on the actual physical radio telescope using an inertial testing frame with a 363 kg load. The test results confirmed that the control room software successfully communicated with the sensor network, control room hardware, mobile application, and back-end to run the telescope in an automated mode. The mobile application interacted with the control room application to control the telescope remotely. A virtual reality simulation was effective in understanding the telescope operation and demonstrating its capabilities.