There are several large ground-based telescopes currently under development such as the SKA and CCAT in radio as well as several 30m-class in the optical. A common challenge that all of these telescopes are facing is estimating the cost of design, construction and maintenance of their required software. This paper will present a cost breakdown of the monitoring and control software packages implemented for ASKAP including the effort spent to develop and maintain the in-house code and the effort saved by using third-party software, such as EPICS. The costing for ASKAP will be compared to those for the monitoring and control software of other large ground-based telescopes such as ALMA and VLT. This comparison will highlight trends and commonalities in the costing and provides a useful guide for costing future telescope control software builds or upgrades and the ongoing maintenance cost.

Date Published: 18 July 2014
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9152, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy III, 91521P (18 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055921

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9152:
Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy III
Gianluca Chiozzi; Nicole M. Radziwill, Editor(s)