ANTARES: a prototype transient broker system

The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES) is a joint project of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. The goal is to build the software infrastructure necessary to process and filter alerts produced by time-domain surveys, with the ultimate source of such alerts being the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The ANTARES broker will add value to alerts by annotating them with information from external sources such as previous surveys from across the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, the temporal history of annotated alerts will provide further annotation for analysis. These alerts will go through a cascade of filters to select interesting candidates. For the prototype, ‘interesting’ is defined as the rarest or most unusual alert, but future systems will accommodate multiple filtering goals. The system is designed to be flexible, allowing users to access the stream at multiple points throughout the process, and to insert custom filters where necessary. We describe the basic architecture of ANTARES and the principles that will guide development and implementation.