The UCR gamma ray telescope data acquisition system

Author

O´Neil, T.J. ; Sweeney, W.E. ; Tumer, O.T. ; Zych, A.D. ; White, R.S.

Author_Institution

Inst. of Geophys. & Planetary Phys., California Univ., Riverside, CA, USA

Volume

35

Issue

1

fYear

1988

Firstpage

511

Lastpage

515

Abstract

A description is given of an electronics system based on the DEC Falcon SBC-11/23+, which has been designed and built to support a balloon-borne double Compton gamma-ray telescope. The system provides support for commands, data acquisition, data routing and compression, and photomultiplier tube gain control. The software consists of a number of interrupt-driven routines of differing priorities to handle each system task. This includes two circular buffers for onboard processing and bit encoding before transmission of the information to the ground computer. Acquisition of gamma-ray events at rates above the 200-Hz telemetry constraint is easily achieved.<>

Keywords

astronomical instruments; astronomical telescopes; astronomy computing; data acquisition; gamma-ray astronomy; DEC Falcon SBC-11/23+; UCR gamma ray telescope data acquisition system; balloon-borne double Compton gamma-ray telescope; bit encoding; circular buffers; data routing; electronics system; gamma-ray events, acquisition rate; interrupt-driven routines; onboard processing; photomultiplier tube gain control; software; CAMAC; Data acquisition; Gain control; Gamma rays; Particle scattering; Photoelectricity; Photomultipliers; Plastics; Telescopes; Virtual manufacturing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9499

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/23.12775

Filename

12775