The ALMA archive and its place in the astronomy of the future

Felix Stoehr; Mark Lacy; Stephane Leon; Erik Muller; Alisdair Manning; Christophe Moins; Dustin Jenkins

doi:10.1117/12.2055539

28 July 2014 The ALMA archive and its place in the astronomy of the future

Felix Stoehr, Mark Lacy, Stephane Leon, Erik Muller, Alisdair Manning, Christophe Moins, Dustin Jenkins

Proceedings Volume 9149, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems V; 914902 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2055539
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2014, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, is the largest astronomical project in existence. While ALMA’s capabilities are ramping up, Early Science observations have started. The ALMA Archive is at the center of the operations of the telescope array and is designed to manage the 200 TB of data that will be taken each year, once the observatory is in full operations. We briefly describe design principles. The second part of this paper focuses on how astronomy is likely to evolve as the amount and complexity of data taken grows. We argue that in the future observatories will compete for astronomers to work with their data, that observatories will have to reorient themselves to from providing good data only to providing an excellent end-to-end user-experience with all its implications, that science-grade data-reduction pipelines will become an integral part of the design of a new observatory or instrument and that all this evolution will have a deep impact on how astronomers will do science. We show how ALMA’s design principles are in line with this paradigm.

Citation Download Citation

Felix Stoehr, Mark Lacy, Stephane Leon, Erik Muller, Alisdair Manning, Christophe Moins, and Dustin Jenkins "The ALMA archive and its place in the astronomy of the future", Proc. SPIE 9149, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems V, 914902 (28 July 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2055539

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