Remote wireless control for LAMOST telescope

Abstract

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The R&D of the Chinese 4-m ever-ambitious telescope, Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), has advanced towards a new stage, and first light is expected by the end of 2006. As one of national scientific and engineering projects the telescope will become national facility and accommodate maximum accessibility for public reach in general and for the astronomical community in particular. Thus remote or even robotic control of the telescope is put under careful exploration. With the rapid development of IT technology one of the fashions is the mobile telephone carried around by average people mainly for daily communication, and mobile notes application has become a real hit. This paper presents GSM based remote wireless application adapted to telescope control, which can be utilized for greatly enhancing LAMOST’ accessibility. The novel technique has recently been developed in LAMOST control lab.Test has demonstrated successful execution of Monitor & Control (M&C) commands for LAMOST through remote wireless mobile. The hardware and software configuration with techniques involved for reliable and secure communication is outlined in this paper too.