APECS – the Atacama pathfinder experiment control system

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