CARMENES: data flow J. A. Caballero* a,b , J. Guàrdia c , M. López del Fresno b , M. Zechmeister d , E. de Juan e , F. J. Alonso-Floriano f , P. J. Amado g , J. Colomé c , M. Cortés-Contreras f , Á. García-Piquer c , L. Gesa c , E. de Guindos e , H.-J. Hagen h , J. Helmling e , L. Hernández Castaño e , M. Kürster i , J. López-Santiago f , D. Montes f , R. Morales Muñoz g , A. Pavlov i , A. Quirrenbach a , A. Reiners d , I. Ribas c , W. Seifert a , E. Solano b a Landessternwarte (ZAH), Königstuhl 12, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany; b Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA), Campus ESAC, Camino Bajo del Castillo s/n, E-28692 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain; c Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (CSIC-IEEC), Campus UAB, c/ de Can Magrans s/n, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain; d Institut für Astrophysik, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany; e Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán (MPG-CSIC), Observatorio Astronómico de Calar Alto, Sierra de los Filabres, E-04550 Gérgal, Almería, Spain; f Departamento de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, E-28040 Madrid, Spain; g Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC), Glorieta de la Astronomía s/n, E-18008 Granada, Spain; h Hamburger Sternwarte, Gojenbergsweg 112, D-21029 Hamburg, Germany; i Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany ABSTRACT CARMENES, the new Calar Alto spectrograph especially built for radial-velocity surveys of exoearths around M dwarfs, is a very complicated system. For reaching the goal of 1 m/s radial-velocity accuracy, it is appropriate not only to monitor stars with the best observing procedure, but to monitor also the parameters of the CARMENES subsystems and safely store all the engineer and science data. Here we describe the CARMENES data flow from the different subsystems, through the instrument control system and pipeline, to the virtual-observatory data server and astronomers. Keywords: Site operations, data networks, computers, instrument control systems, pipelines, astronomical databases 1. INTRODUCTION In general, scientists show their greatest interest in imposing the top-level requirements in the conceptual and preliminary design phases at the beginning of an instrumental project, and in retrieving and analysing the output data during the science exploitation phase at the end of the project. Meanwhile, optical, mechanical, electric and software engineers focus their attention in some of the intermediate steps of the project, from the preliminary and final design phases, through the manufacture, assembly, integration and verification phase, to the instrument commissioning. As a result, only a few individuals (e.g., Principal Investigator, Project Scientist, System Engineer, Project Manager) participate in all steps of the instrumental project. In the case of a complex instrument in which the science results are sensitive to tiny variations in any of the different subsystems, an end-to-end supervision of the data flow is indispensable. CARMENES stands for Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Echelle Spectrographs. It is an ultra-stabilised double-channel spectrograph that covers in one shot from 0.52 μm to 1.71 μm with a spectral resolution greater than 80,000 (Quirrenbach et al., this volume). Its front-end is installed in the Cassegrain focus of the 3.5 m Zeiss telescope of the Calar Alto observatory (Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán, CAHA) in Almería, in the south of Spain. Its two fibre-fed spectrographs, dubbed VIS and NIR, are inside climate * ja.caballero@csic.es; http://carmenes.caha.es Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems VI, edited by Alison B. Peck, Robert L. Seaman, Chris R. Benn, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9910, 99100E · © 2016 SPIE · CCC code: 0277-786X/16/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.2233574 Proc. of SPIE Vol. 9910 99100E-1 Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 12/19/2016 Terms of Use: http://spiedigitallibrary.org/ss/termsofuse.aspx