Organisation

The local organising committee (LOC) consists of,

• Tim Naylor <timn@astro.ex.ac.uk>
• Alasdair Allan <aa@astro.ex.ac.uk>
• Eric Saunders <saunders@astro.ex.ac.uk>

• Tim Naylor <timn@astro.ex.ac.uk>
• Alasdair Allan <aa@astro.ex.ac.uk>
• Iain Steele <ias@astro.livjm.ac.uk>
• Rick Hessman <hessman@astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de>
• Robert White <rwhite@lanl.gov>
• Anuradha Koratkar <koratkar@umbc.edu>
• Tim Jenness <timj@jach.hawaii.edu>

This workshop was funded by an EPSRC grant for "Links to International e-Science Sister Projects", which was obtained in a joint proposal between eSTAR and Robonet-1.0 Projects in the United Kingdom, the MONET Project in Europe, the RAPTOR Project (Los Alamos Laboratory) and SGM Project (NASA Advanced Architectures and Automation Group) in the United States.

About Us

eSTAR Project

The eSTAR project has created a mulit-agent system which is currently used to provide rapid response to Gamma-Ray Burst alerts, and which will soon be used to provide reactive monitoring of exoplanet microlensing events. They use intelligent agent technology to carry out resource discovery, submit observation requests, and analyse the reduced data returned from a network of robotic telescopes working in an observational gird.

Robonet-1.0 Project

RoboNet-1.0 is a prototype global network of large (2m) robotic telescopes. It is based around the utilisation of observing time on the Liverpool Telescope (LT) for specific projects, plus additional time on the Faulkes Telescopes North (FTN) and South (FTS). The LT has been funded from a range of sources including the European Union, PPARC, Liverpool John Moores University and the generous benefaction of Mr Aldham Robarts. It is a UK national facility, primarily used for research. The FTN and FTS have been primarily funded from the Dill Faulkes Educational Trust and are focussed on delivering school-age educational programmes.

MONET Project

MONET is building two 1.2-m aperture telescopes, one to be placed in Texas, the other in South Africa. They also bring experience of writing protocols for specifying observations. Rick Hessman, the project manager, was one of the main developers of Remote Telescope Markup Language (RTML), which was the protocol eSTAR adopted and developed for negotiation between intelligent agents.

SGM Project

The Science Goal Monitor (SGM) team, within the NASA Advanced Architectures and Automation Group, has been working on software that will encapsulate the underlying science goals of a programme, and translate it into observations. They have already developed a system for Earth observation which examines images from the Terra and Aqua satellites, identifies potential regions of interest and requests higher resolution images from the EO-1 satellite. They are also working with Yale University's Small and Moderate Aperture Research Telescope System (SMARTS) to deploy their system for ground based observatories.

RAPTOR Project

The RAPTOR project carries out wide-field astronomical imaging, rapidly processes the data, and then makes follow-up observations with higher resolution instruments. The instruments are distributed amongst four separate mountings, three of which operate at a site 35 miles west of Los Alamos, and one of which is at Los Alamos itself. In the two years it has been operating it has proved the concepts of intelligent observing.