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Register a new userData Acquisition Architecture and Online Processing System for the HAWC gamma-ray observatory
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The High Altitude Water Cherenkov observatory (HAWC) is an air shower array devised for TeV gamma-ray astronomy. HAWC is located at an altitude of 4100 m a.s.l. in Sierra Negra, Mexico. HAWC consists of 300 Water Cherenkov Detectors, each instrumented with 4 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). HAWC re-uses the Front-End Boards from the Milagro experiment to receive the PMT signals. These boards are used in combination with Time to Digital Converters (TDCs) to record the time and the amount of light in each PMT hit (light flash). A set of VME TDC modules (128 channels each) is operated in a continuous (dead time free) mode. The TDCs are read out via the VME bus by Single-Board Computers (SBCs), which in turn are connected to a gigabit Ethernet network. The complete system produces ~ 500 MB/s of raw data. A high-throughput data processing system has been designed and built to enable real-time data analysis. The system relies on off-the-shelf hardware components, an open-source software technology for data transfers (ZeroMQ) and a custom software framework for data analysis (AERIE). Multiple trigger and reconstruction algorithms can be combined and run on blocks of data in a parallel fashion, producing a set of output data streams which can be analyzed in real time with minimal latency (< 5 s). This paper provides an overview of the hardware set-up and an in-depth description of the software design, covering both the TDC data acquisition system and the real-time data processing system. The performance of these systems is also discussed.
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The HAWC collaboration has recently completed the construction of a gamma-ray observatory at an altitude of 4100 meters on the slope of the Sierra Negra volcano in the state of Puebla, Mexico. In order to achieve an optimal angular resolution, energy reconstruction, and cosmic-ray background suppression for the air showers observed by HAWC, it is crucial to obtain good timing and charge calibrations of the photosensors in the detector. The HAWC calibration is based on a laser system which is able to deliver short light pulses to all the tanks in the array. The light intensity can range over 7 orders of magnitude, broad enough to cover all the dynamic range of the PMT readout electronics. In this contribution we will present the HAWC calibration system, together with the methods used to calibrate the detector.
A wide range of data formats and proprietary software have traditionally been used in gamma-ray astronomy, usually developed for a single specific mission or experiment. However, in recent years there has been an increasing effort towards making astronomical data open and easily accessible. Within the gamma-ray community this has translated to the creation of a common data format across different gamma-ray observatories: the gamma-astro-data-format (GADF). Based on a similar premise, open-source analysis packages, such as Gammapy, are being developed and aim to provide a single, robust tool which suits the needs of many experiments at once. In this contribution we show that data from the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory can be made compatible with the GADF and present the first GADF-based production of event lists and instrument response functions for a ground-based wide-field instrument. We use these data products to reproduce with excellent agreement the published HAWC Crab spectrum using Gammapy. Having a common data format and analysis tools facilitates joint analysis between different experiments and effective data sharing. This will be especially important for next-generation instruments, such as the proposed Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO) and the planned Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA).
VAMOS was a prototype detector built in 2011 at an altitude of 4100m a.s.l. in the state of Puebla, Mexico. The aim of VAMOS was to finalize the design, construction techniques and data acquisition system of the HAWC observatory. HAWC is an air-shower array currently under construction at the same site of VAMOS with the purpose to study the TeV sky. The VAMOS setup included six water Cherenkov detectors and two different data acquisition systems. It was in operation between October 2011 and May 2012 with an average live time of 30%. Besides the scientific verification purposes, the eight months of data were used to obtain the results presented in this paper: the detector response to the Forbush decrease of March 2012, and the analysis of possible emission, at energies above 30 GeV, for long gamma-ray bursts GRB111016B and GRB120328B.
The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma Ray Observatory (HAWC) is under construction 4100 meters above sea level at Sierra Negra, Mexico. We describe the design and cabling of the detector, the characterization of the photomultipliers, and the timing calibration system. We also outline a next-generation detector based on the water Cherenkov technique.
The future GAMMA-400 space mission is aimed for the study of gamma rays in the energy range from ~20 MeV up to ~1 TeV. The observations will carry out with GAMMA-400 gamma-ray telescope installed on-board the Russian Space Observatory. We present the detailed description of the architecture and performances of scientific data acquisition system (SDAQ) developing by SRISA for the GAMMA-400 instrument. SDAQ provides the collection of the data from telescope detector subsystems (up to 100 GB per day), the preliminary processing of scientific information and its accumulation in mass memory, transferring the information from mass memory to the satellite high-speed radio line for its transmission to the ground station, the control and monitoring of the telescope subsystems. SDAQ includes special space qualified chipset designed by SRISA and has scalable modular net structure based on fast and high-reliable serial interfaces.
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