Launched in a ceremony carried out on 4 November at the ESO facilities in Santiago (Chile), the new cable for the EVALSO (Enabling Virtual Access to Latin American Southern Observatories) project that connects the Paranal and Cerro Armazones observatories to the Chilean academic network, REUNA, signals the interconnection of the astronomy facilities to Europe through REUNA’s link to RedCLARA and on to GÉANT. The EVALSO link provides 10 Gbps between Paranal and Santiago, traffic capacity that will be shared by ESO, REUNA and RedCLARA.
“This is the first green observatory in the world”, stated Rolf Chini, Director of the Astronomy Institute of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, who participated in the launch event by videoconference. Chini explained that before EVALSO the astronomers that are currently benefited by the project had to wait for five weeks to receive a hard disk with observation data captured by the European telescopes placed in the north of Chile. “Today, EVALSO allows the astronomers to plan their observations for every night in a very efficient way, we don’t need to wait for five weeks, we can operate the robotic telescopes in Atacama in a remote way, we don’t need to travel, this extremely reduces the contamination and it is also a very efficient use of the instrument and of the researchers and operators times”, concluded Chini.
EVALSO is a European Commission FP7 co-funded programme co-ordinated by the University of Trieste and is partnered by ESO, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany), Consortium GARR (Gestione Ampliamento Rete Ricerca - Italy), Universiteit Leiden (Netherlands), Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (Italy), Queen Mary, University of London (UK), CLARA (Cooperación Latino Americana de Redes Avanzadas – Latin America), and REUNA (Red Universitaria Nacional - Chile).
“This project has been an excellent collaboration between the consortium members. As well as giving a fast connection to the two observatories, it brings wider benefits to the academic communities both in Europe and Latin America”, said Fernando Liello, EVALSO project co-ordinator who highlighted the benefits of the bi-continental initiative and of its powerful side effects: “In the north of Chile REUNA’s backbone grows stronger and so does RedCLARA’s”. Liello was extremely clear at the time of talking about the infrastructures behind the initiative that he leads: “EVALSO runs and exists because other infrastructures exist and those are REUNA, RedCLARA and GÉANT”.
The clear skies of the Atacama Desert, the high altitude of the Paranal and Armazones observation facilities and their distance from sources of light pollution make the sites ideal for astronomical observations. However, with this privileged location comes isolation. Before the EVALSO connection was established, these world class facilities were very far from the pre-existing communications infrastructure, and had to reply on a microwave link to send the enormous amounts of scientific data collected by the telescopes back to a base station near Antofagasta. And enormous means precisely that; over 100 gigabytes of data are produced every night by the telescopes at ESO’s Paranal observatory, a quantity of information that is equivalent to more than 20 DVDs even once the files have been compressed. While the microwave link is sufficient to carry the data from the current generation of instruments at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), it does not have the bandwidth required to handle data from the VISTA telescope (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy), or for the new generation of VLT instruments which will come online in the next few years. This is why the only practical way to send a major part of the data collected at Paranal to the ESO Headquarters in Munich has been to save that data on hard drives that are sent by airmail from Chile to Europe. This means that a matter of days and even weeks which are lost in analysis time. This is precisely the problem that EVALSO will solve by means of this new connection.
Tim de Zeeuw, ESO Director General, said: “ESO’s observatory at Paranal is growing, with new telescopes and instruments coming online. Our world-class scientific observatories need state-of-the-art infrastructure.” And that is what EVALSO is, a world class communication infrastructure for world class observatories.
EVALSO will provide a much faster 10 gigabit/s link between the observatories and REUNA, a speed fast enough to transfer an entire DVD movie in a matter of seconds.
Mario Campolargo, Director of Emerging Technologies and Infrastructure at the European Commission, who took part in the launch event by means of a videoconference, said: “It is strategically important that the community of astronomers of Europe gets the best access possible to the ESO observatories: this is one of the reasons why the European Union supports the deployment of regional e-infrastructures for science in Latin America and interlinks them with GÉANT and other EU e-infrastructures”.
The dramatic increase in bandwidth will allow real-time and remote access to data from Paranal. It will also make it easier to monitor the VISTA telescope’s performance, access VLT data. In addition, the expanded bandwidth will open up new possibilities for astronomers and technicians, enabling them to take part in meetings via high-definition videoconferencing without having to travel to Chile. Experts will also be able to work remotely on unexpected and unpredictable events, such as gamma-ray bursts, almost as if they were at the observatory. Perhaps most importantly, the new link will provide enough bandwidth to keep up with the ever-growing volumes of information from Paranal and Armazones in future years, as new and bandwidth-intensive instruments come into use.
José Palacios, President of REUNA’s Board of Directors, emphasized that EVALSO is a great example of the success that international collaboration initiatives can reach in terms of infrastructures development. Palacios invited the national scientists, academics, industrials and the Government to be a part of these initiatives, and to recognize them as an opportunity to generate a technological platform that promotes the development of research, education and innovation in Chile.
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