The Subaru 8m telescope is being developed by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. The Space ScienceTelescope Institute (STScI) is under contract to provide both long range planning short term scheduling software.
Subaru is using the same Ground Based Scheduling Engine that is being used by ESO for the VLT. You can see a top level description of that project under ESO/VLT.
Subaru has requested two major extensions to the Ground Based Scheduler.
- 1) The insertion of Mirror Adjustment activities. These are inserted after slews where a large elevation change has occurred and periodically based upon a user specified interval.
- 2) The optimization of external and internal calibrations in the Short Term Scheduler. The idea is that if two or more observations can share calibration observations, then Spike will only schedule a minimum number of calibration observations that are needed. This project is currently under development. We are collaborting with with ESO/VLT.