This is the source repository for the GROWTH Target of Opportunity Marshal, or ToO Marshal for short. It is a platform that has been developed by the Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH) collaboration in order to coordinate follow-up observations of multimessenger transients. The ToO Marshal's responsibilities include:
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Ingest alerts for astrophysical multimessenger transients from LIGO/Virgo, IceCube, Fermi, Swift, and other experiments.
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Notify on-duty GROWTH astronomers when multimessenger transients occur that meet triggering criteria for science programs.
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Plan optimal observations for a heterogeneous network of ground-based telescopes including ZTF, DECam, KPED, Gattini, and GROWTH-India.
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Submit observations to robotic telescope queues and monitor the progress of observations.
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Provide a central interface for vetting candidates from these facilities in combination with external data sources including the Census of the Local Universe (CLU) galaxy catalog.
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Automatically compose GCN Circular astronomical bulletins.
At its core, the ToO Marshal is powered by two open-source Python packages: ligo.skymap for processing and manipulating gravitational-wave localizations, and gwemopt for multi-facility optimal tiling and observation scheduling.
Architecturally, the ToO Marshal is a Flask web application backed by a PostgreSQL database and using a Celery asynchronous task queue for supervising long-running background operations.