EStar:About
From EStar
About the eSTAR Project
The eScience Telescopes for Astronomical Research (eSTAR) Project is a robotic telescope network. At one end of the system is an Intelligent Agent (IA). This is a piece of software that resides on a user's local machinem, or on a server at the user's institution. It can request observations from resource nodes on the network. It will recieve the results of requested observations which it can autonomously analyse in real time, and potentially follow up on interesting observations.
The intelligent agents will communicate with resource nodes on the network via Grid and Web Service middleware. These nodes are a collection of sub-systems that can recieve observation requests from an IA, and through a series of interactions produce some astronomical data which the agent requested. A resource node is typically a telescope, however, it may also be a middle-ware wrapper around an online astronomical database, VO enabled resource, or other data-serving entity.
The IA was written for the prototype in Perl, and several middleware modules which have been developed for this task are being released by the project under the GNU Public License.
The Project
The eSTAR project is a joint project between the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University and the Astrophysics Research Group of the School of Physics at the University of Exeter. The project works in close collaboration with the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii, and several other groups in the field, including the RAPTOR project at Los Alamos, the MONET project in Germany and the Robonet-1.0 project here in the UK.
The Team
| University of Exeter | ||
|---|---|---|
| Prof. Tim Naylor | +44 (0)1392 264172 | timn[@]astro.ex.ac.uk |
| Dr. Alasdair Allan | +44 (0)1392 264160 | aa[@]astro.ex.ac.uk |
| Mr. Eric Saunders | +44 (0)1392 264124 | saunders[@]astro.ex.ac.uk |
| Mr. Nathan Mayne | +44 (0)1392 264124 | nathan[@]astro.ex.ac.uk |
| Liverpool John Moores University | ||
|---|---|---|
| Dr. Iain Steele | +44 (0)151 231 2912 | ias[@]astro.livjm.ac.uk |
| Prof. Dave Carter | +44 (0)151 231 2914 | dxc[@]astro.livjm.ac.uk |
| Mr. Chris Mottram | +44 (0)151 231 2903 | cjm[@]astro.livjm.ac.uk |
| Mr. Stephen Fraser | +44 (0)151 231 2903 | snf[@]astro.livjm.ac.uk |
| Mr. Neil Clay | +44 (0)151 231 2903 | nrc[@]astro.livjm.ac.uk |
| Joint Astronomy Centre | ||
|---|---|---|
| Dr. Andy Adamson | +1 808 961 3756 | adamson[@]jach.hawaii.edu |
| Dr. Tim Jenness | +1 808 961 3756 | timj[@]jach.hawaii.edu |
| Ms. Frossie Economu | +1 808 961 3756 | frossie[@]jach.hawaii.edu |
| Mr. Brad Cavanagh | +1 808 961 3756 | b.cavanagh[@]jach.hawaii.edu |
About this wiki
The eSTAR wiki is powered by MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia). The custom CSS layout was created by Alasdair Allan based on the modified Monobook MediaWiki skin by Jason Pearce.
