Modernising tools for GFO operation

CI: – Dr. M. Cupak

The Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) at Curtin University is the largest planetary science research group in the Southern Hemisphere. The Fireballs team within SSTC operates a continental scale facility called Desert Fireball Network (DFN) in Australia, which continuously records all-sky astronomic imagery from multiple locations. DFN recently expanded into Global Fireball Observatory (GFO) via international collaborations. The motivation of observing fireballs is unveiling of the solar system history from studying the population and properties of space rocks colliding with the Earth. Multiple station observation makes it possible to triangulate and backtrace trajectories, calculate orbits and determine the origin of meteoroids in the solar system and to compute the fall location of possible meteorites, providing both the fresh meteorite and its known origin.
The goal of this project is to leverage the existing research capabilities in planetary science and astronomy to improve the quality and extend the size of the already unprecedented Fireball dataset collected by DFN/GFO. That will enable higher quality research results, where the science component has already secured ARC funding as a part of Discovery Projects scheme for 2020-2023 (“GFO: Illuminating Solar System origins”).
This is a follow-up project, in the semester 2022a we propose to target the support of ADACS experts in the following two areas:
1) Modernising tools used for monitoring the status of the 100+ remote instruments of the GFO networks. This is currently a large time sink for running the operations.
2) Cut down significantly the time between data acquisition and reduced data available to scientists (~ 5 times, from days to hours).
SSTC already has HPC time and data store allocation of 3PB at Pawsey supercomputing centre, as well as long term Nectar allocation, which is used for docker repository and as development/test environment.