EPISODE TEN
Australian highlight: Dr Vanessa Moss, radio astronomer
Ah! moment: Creating SAURON to automate telescope observing
Astronomer Dr Vanessa Moss has studied cosmic phenomena across the universe, from the hidden structures of the Milky Way to distant black holes. She also has extensive experience in data analysis and visualisation, as well as the automation of complex systems.
Vanessa is Head of Science Operations for the ASKAP radio telescope, which is owned and operated by CSIRO, our national science agency. Situated in a remote location, the telescope was always planned to be controlled remotely – by a human. But Vanessa has taken this a step further by building a system to autonomously control the telescope, called SAURON.
For those of us that are outside the LOTR realm, Sauron is the bad guy. But in this case, SAURON stands for Scheduling Autonomously Under Reactive Observational Needs, and it’s helping us see as much of the sky as possible.
Image: Vanessa Moss
Header image: icon for SAURON. Credit: Vanessa Moss
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The autonomous eye
"I got this, don't worry."
is how comedian Seizure Kaiser imagines the voice of SAURON, after hearing an explanation of the system's function and capabilities.
It's the dependable collaborator anyone could wish for – quite different to its namesake Sauron from Lord of the Rings, a dark lord hoping to rule all Middle Earth, who has a flaming all-seeing eye above his fortress in Mordor.
This SAURON is much more pleasant. An acronym for Scheduling Autonomously Under Reactive Observational Needs (because scientists love nerdy acronyms), it was developed by astronomer Dr Vanessa Moss for CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope to increase observing efficiencies and give the astronomers more time to research, explore, discover.
Vanessa built her SAURON with lines of Python code and plenty of trial and error. Any mistakes made in the past, like using the wrong parameter or missing a weather event, inform SAURON’s algorithms to make sure they don’t happen again.
“Some of the time I'm like, what are you doing SAURON? And it turns out it's remembered something I haven't because it's tracking all those parameters and it doesn't forget, and it doesn't ever need to sleep or eat or anything.”
But humans are still never too far away. For example, there are some limits to the kind of work SAURON can be trusted to manage entirely on its own. Telescope safety is paramount, so during activities where ASKAP’s sensitive receivers are getting close to the Sun (which emits a lot of radio waves that can ‘blind’ the telescope) in a task called ‘beamforming’, someone will be working with SAURON to double-check weather conditions. This is a collaboration, after all.
Image: One of 36 dishes that make up CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope. Credit: CSIRO/Alex Cherney
“Very remote means you have to think about operating it in a different way.”
The ASKAP radio telescope is made up of 36 dish antennas, located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory on Wajarri Country, about 5 hours drive inland from Geraldton, WA or more than 800km North-East of Perth. This is pretty remote.
Radio telescopes are being built and operated on this site as it keeps them away from the radio noise caused by our communication systems, entertainment devices and even vehicles (especially now that most cars have some sort of Blutooth device).
So from the beginning, ASKAP’s operations were designed to work from anywhere in the world, as long as you had internet access. But a fully autonomous scheduler was not part of original plans. Since 2019, Vanessa has been assessing ASKAP’s systems to look for inefficiencies, and one of the first things she noted was that the observing process – choosing which part of the sky to look at when and how, then aiming and calibrating the telescope at that point – was fairly tedious and involved a lot of click-based interaction with an interface. An automated system would instead access and collate the required information to dynamically decide what to do much quicker than a human. It just hadn’t been done on this scale before.
Images:
Vanessa with ASKAP; A part of the Galactic plane showing supernova remnants. Credit: R. Kothes and the EMU and POSSUM teams; Galaxies spinning in space, WALLABY. credit: T. Reynolds and the WALLABY team.
“We're going to try something different.”
ASKAP is a new, cutting-edge telescope using a lot of the newest technologies. It’s connected to one of the country’s best supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.
When it comes to operations, facilities of this scale tend to hang on to human-dependent systems throughout, often due to historical precedent. But for the ASKAP case, Vanessa took a risk, choosing to develop and include SAURON, and it has paid off. There are increased efficiencies, better observing, and much less time in front of a screen clicking buttons. She was finding new opportunities in existing infrastructure to really push what was possible.
So much so that, for a new telescope being built in the USA – the Deep Synoptic Array (DSA) – a version of Vanessa’s SAURON is being embedded from the beginning. An after-thought is now a first-thought.
“This time we're starting before the telescopes even hit the ground. We're starting from a point of saying, all right, we want it to be as autonomous as possible. What have we learned from SAURON and how could we do better in the DSA case?
“I'm hoping that more and more observatories head more in this direction because it makes it easier.”
While SAURON is handling much of the scheduling now for ASKAP, it doesn't mean that's it for SAURON. Vanessa and the team are always developing new features for it, to better enable ASKAP's delivery of diverse science.
Image: icon for SAURON
“There's magnetic fields, supernova remnants, galaxies... There's a lot of different sciences.”
So what is SAURON enabling from a science research perspective?
There are nine science projects using ASKAP to look deep into space. The names of these projects are different acronyms, usually animal related, that add an extra level of entertainment to the incredible research they are doing. As Seizure says,
“Goddamn nerds.”
EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) and POSSUM (Polarisation Sky Survey of the Universe's Magnetism) are answering galactic questions that we’ve never had the technology to explore. An image of the Galactic plane shows more signs of past supernova explosions than ever before, helping us understand the evolution of our own galaxy and the forces involved in star birth and death.
WALLABY (Widefield ASKAP L-Band Legacy All-Sky Blind Survey) shared an image that maps the movement of distant galaxies. Looking like an array of rainbow popcorn, blue shows movement towards us, while red shows the opposite, enabling scientists to track the spinning and twisting of enormous galaxies invisible to the human eye.
Vanessa is part of FLASH (First Large Absorption Survey in HI) and RACS (Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey), which detected 3 million galaxies, where 1 million of these had never been seen before. With a system like SAURON efficiently handling the routine work, she can tackle bigger questions, explore more data, and find new avenues of research being revealed by these projects.
She’s made space for the work that truly matters. And naming her collaborator after a fictional villain? Well, that’s just a bit of fun.
Image:
CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope. Credit: CSIRO/Alex Cherney
This episode's comedic guest: Seizure Kaiser
Seizure has been a comedian for close to 20 years. He is the Creative Director of Comedy on the Edge, where he is regularly creating new spaces and new formats for comedians to perfect their art and audiences to discover new theatrical experiences.
But Seizure also a writer, filmmaker, event manager, game developer, and everyone’s favourite person at the pub.