ASARINA — how it got its name

The “ASAR” part is a borrowed acronym. It started out in an unrelated project — QUASAR, short for Qu(vik)-ASAR, an autonomous strategy for afterglow response being developed for a space-based instrument. ASARINA started life without a proper name of its own — just the telescope-dependent orchestration layer sitting on top of PYRT, built for the D50 telescope and picking up the same “ASAR” jargon along the way. The first instinct, while joking about it, was to give each telescope its own variant — D50-ASAR, SBT-ASAR, PEREK-ASAR — but that was immediately the wrong idea: this was never meant to be one acronym per instrument. It is one single system, coordinating D50, SBT and whatever else sits at the same node, and it deserved one name to match.

A single, telescope-agnostic pipeline maintained in one repository deserved a name of its own, not a family of near-duplicate acronyms. Nothing sensible came out of forcing a new acronym from words like “ground-based”, “optical”, or “transient”. What did stick was Asarina — the flowering vine (and a name that reads naturally as a diminutive of ASAR). Software that has caused this much grief clearly deserves to be treated as temperamental and feminine, so the gender stuck too.

The -ina was left without a forced meaning at first, on the grounds that not every name needs to decompose into words. It was retrofitted afterwards, mostly for fun, as Intelligent Network Architecture — a nod to the fact that, unlike the single-instrument system it borrowed “ASAR” from, this one is built to coordinate several telescopes together at one node.