Letter to the Editor

APECS – the Atacama pathfinder experiment control system

¹ Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Auf dem Hügel 69, 53121 Bonn, Germany e-mail: dmuders@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
² Space Science and Technology Department, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, Oxfordshire OX11 0QX, UK
³ Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Universität Bonn, Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany
⁴ School of Physics, University of Exeter, Stocker Road, Exeter EX4 4QL, UK 
⁵ SRON National Institute for Space Research, Landleven 12, 9747 AD Groningen, The Netherlands

Received: 4 April 2006
Accepted: 3 May 2006

Abstract

APECS is the distributed control system of the new Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope located on the Llano de Chajnantor at an altitude of 5107 m in the Atacama desert in northern Chile. APECS is based on Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) software and employs a modern, object-oriented design using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) as the middleware. New generic device interfaces simplify adding instruments to the control system. The Python based observer command scripting language allows using many existing software libraries and facilitates creating more complex observing modes. A new self-descriptive raw data format (Multi-Beam FITS or MBFITS) has been defined to store the multi-beam, multi-frequency data. APECS provides an online pipeline for initial calibration, observer feedback and a quick-look display. APECS is being used for regular science observations in local and remote mode since August 2005.