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Amy L. Shelton is division head of software development for a huge radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). NRAO HQ is in Charlottesville, VA, but Shelton works at the Green Bank, WV site, where the world's largest fully-steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, is located.
It's an exciting job, developing technology to enhance the telescope's performance and enable scientists to explore more of outer space.
NRAO is one of the world's premier research facilities for radio astronomy, and the only radio-based national facility in the U.S. Green Bank's advanced radio telescope studies the skies of the western hemisphere; internationally known scientists come there to work. The facility is run by Associated Universities Inc, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Projects going on
Shelton's division is responsible for development and maintenance of most of the software used by the Green Bank telescope, including monitor and control software, user interfaces and data analysis and reduction. "At any given time we have half a dozen or more projects going on," she says.
A radio telescope, of course, is very different from an optical telescope like the Hubble. You don't see anything; the instrument is gathering radio waves from space. A huge dish catches the waves and directs them to a receiver which forwards the signal through a signal processing chain which ends at the back end and records the signal information to disk.
Radio telescopes collect photons. "With optical telescopes, there's always a lot of interstellar dust between us and what we're looking at, but radio waves pass through it easily," Shelton explains.
C++ and Python
The team uses C++ and Python programming languages. C++ is used to write software that directly controls hardware devices. Python is used for high-level coordination of the hardware as well as for the graphical user interfaces.
Shelton is developing a strategic plan that may include the exchange of design concepts and possibly code implementations between the telescope at Green Bank and other cutting-edge NRAO instruments still in development: the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) located near Socorro, NM, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a multinational endeavor based in Chile.
"My idea is, why recreate software for each facility? We're looking for ways to share software and make ourselves more efficient with the exchange of ideas."
Motivated by the work
Shelton notes with a laugh that "The career ladder at NRAO is more like a stepstool. Our people are motivated by the work they do, not the title they have."
Shelton grew up in Huber Heights, OH. Her mother was a chain store supervisor and her father was in purchasing. In high school Shelton participated in a two-week summer program put on by the NSF. "They showed us about electronics and how to put circuits together, and I decided I liked it," she says.
She got her BSEE from the University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH) in 1998. In college she did a three-year co-op at NRAO, alternating three-month stints at the facility and at school. She met her husband John at the observatory.
After graduation she returned to Green Bank as a digital engineer II, developing and testing real-time C++ software for the telescope. She moved up to software engineer II. In 2003 she completed an MS in software engineering through a University of Maryland online program. She became deputy division head in 2004 and took over her current job last year.
"There's an element of software that's addicting," Shelton says. "You get the programmer's high." Astronomy facilities are generally small, with small software development groups, so you don't want to be too specialized, she notes. "It helps to know a little about everything."
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