Modernising Observatory Control: Integrating Legacy DRAMA with Next-Generation Instrumentation

Résumé fourni par la source

The DRAMA framework was originally developed at the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) in the early 1990s, with its first release in 1992. Designed in C and C++, DRAMA provides a distributed, message-based control architecture that has powered major instruments such as the 2dF fibre positioner, fibre-fed spectrographs like AAOmega and HERMES, and the IRIS2 infrared imager on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, and the TAIPAN instrument on the UK Schmidt Telescope. Despite its age, DRAMA remains a robust and well-structured system whose real-time behaviour and modular task oriented design continue to be valuable for astronomical instrumentation. As new instruments are being developed at the AAO, we are extending and adapting the DRAMA environment to meet the current software engineering and deployment requirements. Our recent improvements include containerising DRAMA using Docker and a modern Python interface that enables integration without modifying the underlying codebase. This approach preserves the reliability of the original framework, and allows new instruments to adopt DRAMA within more flexible and maintainable ecosystems. At present, DRAMA continues to play an active role in our development efforts: it is being used for the newly built KSPEC spectrograph on the KMTNet telescope, and also forms the control architecture for the high-resolution spectrograph being developed for the Devasthal Optical Telescope.

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