Right now, in April 2024, the Vatican’s flagship telescope is being transformed into a fully automated, robotic telescope.
Last year, the Vatican Observatory celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT), located on Mt. Graham in Arizona (USA). The VATT’s name comes from its radical design, now found in the world’s largest telescopes (actually, the VATT’s full, proper name is the Alice P. Lennon Telescope, housed in the Thomas J. Bannan Astrophysics Facility). Now the Observatory is transforming the VATT for the future.
When looking to the future in science, it would be ideal to be able to decide what we want to explore, and then obtain the right equipment for that. That’s “purpose-driven” science. But the reality is often that we have existing equipment, and we have to decide what we can explore with what we have. That could be called “equipment-driven” science. The robotization of the VATT bridges these two. We are transforming our existing observatory, which already boasts excellent telescope optics and a location with outstanding atmospheric quality for astronomical research, so that in the future we can do the research that we want to do, and attract collaborators interested in joining us.
The observatory’s new automated control system is being named “Don” in honor of Donald M. Alstadt (1921-2007). “Don” was made possible by a grant from The Thomas Lord Charitable Trust and a gift from Mrs. Judith Alstadt honoring her husband. Donald Alstadt served as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Lord Corporation.
“Don” is designed and built by ProjectSoft HK. It is modular, based on Beckhoff industrial Programmable Logic Controllers, Renishaw encoders and EMLO drives. Its software is designed to remain stable regardless of computer updates. It will steer the telescope’s mount, pointing the VATT with a precision of better than half a percent of the diameter of the full moon. “Don” will also control numerous support systems: a weather station, the telescope dome and the dome slit shutters, the oiling system for the mount’s bearings, the cooling system for the VATT’s main mirror, and more.
“Don” will offer several operational modes. The most basic, and the first to be available, will be the “legacy mode”. An astronomer on-site at the Bannan Astrophysics Facility will operate the telescope and instruments. This will resemble the current operational mode, the only differences being greater reliability, more efficient performance, and a superior level of user experience. The startup and shutdown procedures for the telescope will be fully automated. The user will initiate those by a simple command from the user interface in the control room. There will be no walking around and manually starting up and later shutting down each subsystem of the telescope. There will also be less time needed for aligning and focusing the telescope’s optics.
The next step up is “remote mode”. This will allow astronomers using the telescope to work from their own locations, without the need to be on site. We will even be able to control the VATT in Arizona from the Vatican Observatory’s headquarters in Castel Gandolfo south of Rome! In the most sophisticated “scripted mode”, “Don” will run a sequence of instructions prepared by an astronomer, operating the VATT without direct human monitoring and control. We envisage that various teams of users will develop their own scripts.
This will be after the telescope proves safe to run unsupervised. Before turning control over to “Don”, we will apply an abundance of caution, with extensive testing to make sure that nothing goes wrong. No, we are not thinking of something from a science fiction movie:
Paul Gabor: “open the dome shutters, Don.”
Don: “I’m sorry Fr. Paul. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Rather, we simply need to make sure “Don” quickly closes the dome shutters when bad weather comes.
The VATT’s robotic future is promising!