A safety-driven point of view on the use of industrial technologies: trade-off on the implementation

Abstract

The road to increasingly more challenging and bigger systems in astronomy is resulting in as much bigger challenges to the safety for people and things. As well for the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) instrumentation and modules, these big "systems" collaborate and share the same environment and spaces, and, as for the AO module MORFEO (Multi-conjugate adaptive Optics Relay For ELT Observations) and the MICADO camera (Multi-AO Imaging Camera for Deep Observations), some subsystems are strongly embedded, even if they are designed by different consortia. Therefore, the designers are thinking to even more sophisticated systems to assure the safety and communication of information between the different instruments. In this context, the MORFEO consortium is investigating on the possibility to use industrial safety modules, architecturally integrated in the overall control system. This approach can highly help in the fulfilling of even more complex requirements with the high flexibility required to grant the possibility, during the telescope life, of one or more upgrading of the instrumentation and their way to co-operate. The paper goes through a comparison between the in-house designed safety solution, widely used in the past, and the industrial safety systems and the implementation of these technologies in the ground-based astronomy.