The Swarm Telescope Concept

Abstract

As telescope facilities become increasingly more capable, they also become increasingly complex and require additional resources to operate. This is particularly true for the current and future generations of “software defined telescopes” that can support a variety of observing programs simultaneously, either through commensal observations or through support for multiple pointing centers as in the case of dipole arrays or dishes equipped with phased array feeds. At the same time, many current and future facilities are also distributed over large geographic areas, making monitoring and maintenance more difficult and costly. For these reasons, we have developed a new paradigm for telescope operations called the “swarm telescope” that breaks large, single facilities into smaller groups of independent systems that can collaboratively work together to function as a single facility but with much less operational overhead. In this paper, we outline the swarm telescope concept and an example of its implementation at the Long Wavelength Array. We also discuss potential advantages of using this approach for other facilities, in particular the Next Generation Very Large Array.