Troy J. Ames (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center), Kenneth B. Sall, Craig Warsaw (Century Computing, Inc.)
This presentation will describe a real-world experience in developing an XML (Extensible Markup Language) vocabulary to aid in collaborative scientific research involving infrared astronomy. The goal of the Instrument Remote Control (IRC) project is to develop a distributed framework from science user to instrument which will provide robust interactive and reconfigurable control and monitoring of remote instrumentation. The focus of the joint effort between NASA/GSFC's Advanced Architectures and Automation branch (Code 588) and Century Computing has been infrared astronomy, although most of the techniques employed have much wider applicability.
IRC will eventually enable trusted infrared astronomers around the world to easily access infrared astronomical instruments (telescopes, cameras, etc.) located in remote, inhospitable environments, such as the South Pole, a high Chilean mountaintop, and an airborne observatory aboard a Boeing 747. For the airborne 747, Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), the instruments to be controlled are High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera (HAWC) and ultimately Submillimeter And Far InfraRed Experiment (SAFIRE).
The long-term focus is to develop an extensible GUI to which new instruments can be added with relative ease. This will eventually be accomplished by implementing our own Instrument Control Markup Language (ICML) based on a custom Document Type Definition (DTD). ICML will be used to describe control capabilities, data streams, message formats, and communication mechanisms, as well as for online documentation and the association of houskeeping metadata with acquired images. Some of these aspects of instrument control will be reflected in Java graphical user interfaces, generated from the descriptions.