SSRP Abstract

Board 28: Documentation of SOCS and Hardware Simulation for CMB-S4

Student Scientist: Hannah Green ’24
Research Mentor: Abigail Crites (Department of Astrophysics, Cornell University)

CMB-S4 is a network of telescopes that will be begin taking data in 2029. It hopes to confirm or deny current theories about the state of the very early universe, as well as map dark matter in our universe. My research involved making the software that interacts with these telescopes easier to install and write through thorough documentation, as well coding simulations of hardware that can be used to help others make their own software.

Simons Observatory’s Observatory Control System (SOCS) is being used as the framework for CMB-S4’s overall data acquisition system (DAQ). In this project, we focused mainly on documenting and researching OCS, as prior to this point, it was used as a part of a small-scale DAQ. CMB-S4 is a seven-year survey aimed at answering questions on the earliest stages of the universe through the study of gravitational waves. It consists of 18 small aperture telescopes and 6 large aperture telescopes spread throughout two sites located in Chile and the south pole, compared to Simons’ total of four telescopes. Due to the difference of these project’s scale, SOCS has documentation currently directed solely at the researchers who work at Simons’. In CMB-S4, researchers must be able to install and run SOCS on the fly, and this will require much more thorough documentation than what’s currently available. This summer, we documented the installation of SOCS on a clean computer running windows, and began the documentation of what building a software agent to interact with telescope hardware would entail. Future plans involve continuing this process, as well as beginning to simulate certain hardware in order to aid the creation of other necessary agents down the line.