The SKA Dish Local Monitoring and Control System User Interface

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is responsible for developing the SKA Observatory, the world's largest radiotelescope ever built: eventually two arrays of radio antennas - SKA1-Mid and SKA1-Low - will be installed in the South Africa's Karoo region and Western Australia's Murchison Shire, each covering a different range of radio frequencies. In particular SKA1-Mid array will comprise 133 15m diameter dish antennas observing in the 350 MHz-14 GHz range, each locally managed by a Local Monitoring and Control (LMC) system and remotely orchestrated by the SKA Telescope Manager (TM) system. Dish LMC will provide a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to be used for monitoring and Dish control in standalone mode for testing, TM simulation, integration, commissioning and maintenance. This paper gives a status update of the LMC GUI design involving users and tasks analysis, system prototyping, interface evaluation and provides details on the GUI prototypes being developed and technological choices.