KEYWORDS: Data archive systems, Databases, Observatories, Astronomy, Standards development, Telescopes, Visualization, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Space telescopes, Data storage
Broad support for Virtual Observatory (VO) standards by astronomical archives is critical for the success of the
VO as a research platform. Indeed, a number of effective data discovery, visualization, and integration tools
have been created which rely on this broad support. Thus, to an archive, the motivation for supporting VO
standards is strong. However, we are now seeing a growing trend among archive developers towards leveraging
VO standards and technologies not just to provide interoperability with the VO, but also to support an archive's
internal needs and the needs of the archive's primary user base. We examine the motivation for choosing VO
technologies for implementing an archive's functionality and list several current examples, including from the
Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA HEASARC, NOAO, and NRAO. We will also speculate on the effect that VO
will have on some of the ambitious observatory projects planned for the near future.
The Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) project is the next generation
instrument for high resolution long-millimeter to short-meter
wavelength radio astronomy. It is currently funded by NSF, with
completion scheduled for 2012. The EVLA will upgrade the VLA with new feeds, receivers, data transmission hardware, correlator, and a new software system to enable the instrument to achieve its full potential. This software includes both that required for controlling and monitoring the instrument and that involved with the scientific
dataflow. We concentrate here on a portion of the dataflow software,
including: proposal preparation, submission, and handling; observation preparation, scheduling, and remote monitoring; data archiving; and data post-processing, including both automated (pipeline) and manual processing. The primary goals of the software are: to maximize the scientific return of the EVLA; provide ease of use, for both novices and experts; exploit commonality amongst all NRAO telescopes where possible. This last point is both a bane and a blessing: we are not at liberty to do whatever we want in the software, but on the other hand we may borrow from other projects (notably ALMA and GBT) where appropriate. The software design methodology includes detailed initial use-cases and requirements from the scientists, intimate interaction between the scientists and the programmers during design and implementation, and a thorough testing and acceptance plan.
The goal of the Simple Spectral Access (SSA) specification is to define a uniform interface to spectral data including spectral energy distributions (SEDs), 1D spectra, and time series data. In contrast to 2D images, spectra are stored in a wide variety of formats and there is no widely used standard in astronomy for representing spectral data, hence part of the challenge of specifying SSA was defining a general spectrophotometric data model as well as definitions of standard serializations in a variety of data formats including XML and FITS. Access is provided to both atlas (pre-computed) data and to virtual data which is computed on demand. The term simple in Simple Spectrum Access refers to the design goal of simplicity in both implementing spectral data services and in retrieving spectroscopic data from distributed data collections. SSA is a product of the data access layer (DAL) working group of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The requirements were derived from a survey among spectral data providers and data consumers and were further refined in a broad discussion in meetings and electronic forums as well as by prototyping efforts within the European Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) and the US National Virtual Observatory (NVO).
Wide field-of-view, high-resolution near-infrared cameras on 4-m class telescopes have been identified by the astronomical community as critical instrumentation needs in the era of 8-m and larger telescopes. Acting as survey instruments, they will provide the input source discoveries for large-telescope follow-up observations. The NOAO Extremely Wide Field Infrared Mosaic (NEWFIRM) imaging instrument will serve this need within the US system of facilities. NEWFIRM is being designed for the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) 4-m telescopes (Mayall at KPNO and Blanco at CTIO). NEWFIRM covers a 28 x 28 arcmin field of view over the 1-2.4 μm wavelength range with a 4k x 4k pixel detector mosaic assembled from 2k x 2k modules. Pixel scale is 0.4 arcsec/pixel. Data pipelining and archiving are integral elements of the instrument system. We present the science drivers for NEWFIRM, and describe its optical, mechanical, electronic, and software components. By the time this paper is presented, NEWFIRM will be in the preliminary design stage, with first light expected on the Mayall telescope in 2005.
The NOAO Mosaic CCD Camera consists of 8 CCDs producing an 8K X 8K format. The Mosaic Data Handling System (MDHS) receives data packets from the detector system and broadcasts them on a message bus. A data capture agent (DCA) receives the data and formats it into a set of distributed shared images (DSI). The images are displayed as they are received by a real-time display (RTD) and are recorded to disk as multiextension FITS (MEF) files by the DCA. The DCA triggers a data reduction agent (DRA) to do standard pipeline processing and archiving with a graphical user interface (GUI) for user interaction. The MDHS provides a suite of IRAF data reduction tools for the user and DRA to apply to the MEF mosaic data. The tools include quick-look analysis of the data in the RTD, basic CCD calibration, mosaic reconstruction, and combining of dithered observations into a fully populated (gaps removed) image.
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