A 3D User Interface for the Active Reflector of Large Radio Telescope

A 3D user interface is developed to solve the monitoring problem of the active reflector of large radio telescope, which could show the movement and health state of the active reflector via Open Graphics Library (OpenGL). To accomplish such an interface, the distributed environment is simulated by 4 PCs that are connected to a switched Ethernet. Network Time Protocol (NTP) is employed to synchronize the clocks of PCs over Ethernet, and the Vertex Buffer Object (VBO) extension in OpenGL is introduced to accelerate the display speed of the active reflector. Users could manage and control the large radio telescope directly by interacting with this 3D user interface.