urn:nasa:pds:context:facility:laboratory.asf 1.1 1.22.0.0 Product_Context Australian Synchrotron 2025-01-07 1.1 Updated schema version. 2018-08-27 1.0 Initial creation of the context product, plus snuck in lidref change to brukifs125hr urn:nasa:pds:context:instrument:asf.thz_farir_beamline facility_to_instrument urn:nasa:pds:context:instrument:multi-host.brukifs125hr_ftspec facility_to_instrument Australian Synchrotron Facility Laboratory The Australian Synchrotron Facility (ASF) is a 3 GeV national synchrotron facility located in Clayton in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The Australian Synchrotron is a light source facility, which uses particle accelerators to produce a beam of high energy electrons that are boosted to nearly the speed of light. The light is captured by experimental endstations, which contain specialised equipment, enabling a range of research applications including high resolution imagery that is not possible under normal laboratory conditions. ASF supports the research needs of Australia‚ major universities and research centres, and businesses ranging from small-to-medium enterprises to multinational companies. During 2014-15 the Australian Synchrotron supported more than 4,300 researcher visits and close to 1,000 experiments in areas such as medicine, agriculture, environment, defence, transport, advanced manufacturing and mining. Each digital and analogue I/O channel is associated with a database entry in a customised distributed open source database system called EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System). The condition of the system is monitored and controlled by connecting specialised GUIs to the specified database entries. There are about 115,000 database entries (also known as process variables), most of which relate to the physical I/O. About 35,000 of these are permanently archived at intervals ranging from milliseconds to minutes. Some high level control of the physics-related parameters of the beam is provided through MATLAB which also provides data analysis tools and an interface with a computerised model of the accelerator. Personnel and equipment protection is achieved through the use of PLC-based systems, which also transfer data to EPICS. The Beamlines also use EPICS as the basis for their control. For more information, see https://www.ansto.gov.au