MeerKAT Operations in the era of Large Astronomical Telescopes

The MeerKAT radio telescope, with a full 64-dish antenna complement, is expected to be ready for standard operations towards the end of the first quarter of 2018. This includes having an end-to-end operational chain of systems, including antennas, receptors, digitisers, correlators, signal displays, processing pipelines and, control and monitoring interfaces. The MeerKAT telescope is one of the few such systems built following a Systems Engineering process, with lots of technical challenges to make it functional at an operational level.1 Several large, scientific survey projects are expected to integrate with the MeerKAT operational system as soon as data flows through the system. Lessons learnt during system level integration and engineering debugging are also notable.