The Maunakea Laser Traffic Control System (LTCS) has been in use since 2002 providing a mechanism to prevent the laser guide star or Rayleigh scatter from a laser propagated from one telescope from interfering with science observations at any of the other telescopes that share the mountain. LTCS has also been adopted at several other astronomical sites around the world to address that same need. In 2014 the stakeholders on Maunakea began the process of improving LTCS capability to support common observing techniques with enhanced First On Target (FoT) equity. The planned improvements include support for non-sidereal observing, laser checkout at zenith, dynamic field of view size, dithering, collision calculations even when a facility is not laser impacted, multiple alert severity levels, and software refactoring. The design of these improvements was completed in early 2015, and implementation is expected to be completed in 2016. This paper describes the Maunakea LTCS collaboration and the design of these planned improvements.

Date Published: 27 July 2016
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 9909, Adaptive Optics Systems V, 99095J (27 July 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2230832

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9909:
Adaptive Optics Systems V
Enrico Marchetti; Laird M. Close; Jean-Pierre Véran, Editor(s)