Designing software for the science operations of Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE)

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) will transform the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope into an 11.25-m aperture telescope, dedicated to highly multiplexed, visible to near-IR spectroscopic studies with multiple spectral resolution modes. A metric of MSE’s success is survey speed, i.e. how many scientifically useful spectra MSE will obtain in support of its surveys, which requires hardware and software to be designed and perform efficiently. In this paper, we describe the front-end software, which includes proposal review, a scheduler, an exposure time calculator, and a breaker to prepare and define the survey observations, and the back-end software, which includes data reduction and science pipelines, science archive, and science platform to deliver the data back to the science community. The interfaces, the flow of data, and the overarching object model will be explained. We also discuss the tools required to support the Design Reference Survey that describes and simulates the science operations of MSE.