Somesh Kumar Dr' Susan Hoban

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Virtual Telescopes In Education

• Somesh KumarDr. Susan Hoban
• Dr. Yelena Yesha
• Dr. Willard Smith

Funded by NSF Grant No. 0121531
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Introduction

• Funded by NSF
• Main aim to generate interest among students in
  astronomy
• Provides services to operate a virtual
  observatory
• Association with Telescopes in Education (TIE)

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Background

• Helps students formulate astronomy projects
  online
• Helps teachers manage their classrooms and
  evaluate student documents
• Create a repository of student research documents
• Make the repository accessible to other users

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VTIE Process
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Student Interface

• Proposal Generation Interface
• Search Tool
• SkyView (online database)
• Image Analysis Tool
• Visual Target Tuner (VTT)
• IRIS
• Paper Writing Tool
• Message Center

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Screen Shot of Student Interface
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Screen Shot of Glossary Tool
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Teacher Interface

• Classroom Management Tools
• Review Tools
• Proposal
• Paper
• Message Center
• Reading List

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Screen Shot of Review Tool
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Implementation

• Java Servlets
• JSP 2.0
• JavaScript
• Apache Tomcat 4.1.24
• MySQL
• Xindice

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VTIE Architecture
MySql
Web Browser
User Authentication
HTML Data
Client Request
Tomcat Web Server (JSP/Servlets)
Images
User Documents
User Request
Xindice
Extant Data Sources
Data Transfer
RAID
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Technical Challenges

• Solved
• Data Storage issue resolved by addition of RAID
  array
• Instability in Xindice resolved by new upgrade
• Unsolved
• Issues with interfacing with Xindice
• Servlet and JSP deployment
• Tomcat performance not optimum

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Future Work

• Telescope Scheduler Interface
• Make scheduling easy
• Make scheduling transparent
• Telescope Operators Interface
• Registering Telescopes and Instruments
• Allotting time for VTIE users
• Generalized Proposal Generation Interface