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Padovani, P., Abney, F., Christian, D., Comeau, T., Donahue, M., Hanisch, R. J., Harrison, J., Imhoff, C., Kidwell, R., Kimball, T., Levay, K., Postman, M., Richon, J., Smith, M., & Thompson, R. 2000, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 216, Astronomical Data
Analysis Software and Systems IX, eds. N. Manset, C. Veillet, D. Crabtree (San Francisco: ASP), 168
The Multimission Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute
P. Padovani1, F. Abney, D. Christian,
T. Comeau, M. Donahue, R. Hanisch, J. Harrison, C.
Imhoff, R. Kidwell, T. Kimball, K. Levay, M. Postman, J.
Richon, M. Smith, R. Thompson
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD. 21218, USA
Abstract:
We describe the expansion of the Hubble Data Archive into the Multimission
Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute
(MAST), which provides access
also to non-HST data. MAST includes the following: International Ultraviolet
Explorer (IUE), Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE), Copernicus, ORFEUS IMAPS
and BEFS, ASTRO HUT, WUPPE, and UIT data, and VLA FIRST data. MAST is also the
active archive site for the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE),
launched in June 1999, and provides access to the Digitized Sky Survey. MAST
data are stored on two 480-platter Plasmon CD-ROM jukeboxes. Data retrievals,
plans for expansion, and features of the World Wide Web interface are also
presented. The MAST homepage is at
http://archive.stsci.edu/mast.html.
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) holds the Hubble Data Archive
(HDA), which includes all Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations. The HDA,
as of November 1999, contains over 7 TB of science and engineering
data, for a total of science exposures. In the past year the
volume of archived data has reached average rates of about 4 GB/day,
with GB/day retrieved by archive users.
Based on the success of the HDA, and taking advantage of its existing archive
infrastructure, the STScI archive has taken on responsibilities as NASA's
UV/optical/near-IR archive center and has recently expanded by providing
access to non-HST data. The Multimission Archive at the Space Telescope
Science Institute (MAST) includes extreme ultraviolet, ultraviolet, and
selected radio archives, all of which may be accessed at the MAST
homepage.
MAST includes the following missions:
- IUE
- International Ultraviolet Explorer (1200 - 3350 Å), which
contains over 104,000 spectral images of individual astronomical
sources.
- Copernicus
- (OAO-3) far- (900 - 1560 Å) and near- (1650 -
3150 Å) ultraviolet spectra of 551 objects.
- EUVE
- Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (70 - 760 Å) spectroscopic
observations of sources, mostly galactic.
- ASTRO
- three UV missions from ASTRO 1 and 2 Shuttle flights:
- Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) (825 - 1850 Å), which includes
about 500 ultraviolet spectra of more than 300 targets;
- Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photo-polarimeter Experiment (WUPPE)
(1400 - 3200 Å), designed to obtain simultaneous ultraviolet spectra and
polarization measurements. It includes 400 observations of roughly 200 targets;
- Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UIT) (1200 - 3300 Å), which
contains about 1,600 images of more than 200 targets.
- ORFEUS
- Orbiting Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrometers,
two UV missions from ORFEUS 1 and 2 Shuttle flights:
- Interstellar Medium Absorption Profile Spectrograph (IMAPS)
(950 - 1150 Å), designed to obtained high resolution ( for
IMAPS-1) objective-grating echelle spectra. The IMAPS archive currently
contains roughly 600 spectra of 10 hot stars from the first Shuttle
flight. The archive will soon include an additional 3,900 spectra of 29 stars;
- Berkeley Extreme and Far-UV Spectrometer (BEFS) (400 - 1200 Å),
which returned high-resolution () far UV spectra of 75 astrophysical
objects from the first Shuttle flight. The archive will soon include 100 more
spectra from the second Shuttle flight. Extreme UV spectra (400 - 900 Å)
were obtained for a subset of the targets.
- FIRST
- Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-centimeters, a radio
survey at 20 cm (1.4 GHz) of over 10,000 square degrees down to a flux of 1
mJy. Access to the radio images and the source catalog, currently entries, is provided.
- DSS
- Digitized Sky Survey, digitized photographic plates from the
Palomar and UK Schmidt telescopes.
- FUSE
- MAST is the active archive site for the Far Ultraviolet
Spectroscopic Explorer, a NASA-supported mission successfully launched on June
24 1999, which is exploring the Universe with high resolution spectroscopy in
the far UV (905 - 1190 Å) spectral region. FUSE is part of NASA's Origins
Program under the auspices of NASA's Office of Space Science. MAST will
provide access to both proprietary and public FUSE data.
- ROSAT
- As a service to the optical/UV community, MAST provides also
access to ROSAT (ROentgen SATellite) X-ray data. The ROSAT Master observations
log (ROSMASTER) at the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research
Center (HEASARC) is in fact accessible via an interface which is very similar
to the other MAST interfaces.
The MAST holdings are available via simple World Wide Web (WWW) interfaces. A
sample search page for IUE data is shown in Figure 1. Similar interfaces are
available for all MAST data.
Figure 1:
The IUE World Wide Web Interface.
|
Archival data may be searched by name (resolved by SIMBAD or NED), position,
object category, and observation specifics (date, instrument, filters,
exposure time, etc.). Previews are available for most MAST missions, to allow
the user to have a ``quick look'' at the data before retrieving them.
The potential use of the MAST archive is greatly increased by allowing users
to search more than one mission at a time and cross-correlate the archive
holdings with astronomical catalogs. Cross-correlations can be performed using
the Hipparcos stellar catalog, an active galactic nuclei catalog, the Abell
Galaxy Cluster catalog, and any user-supplied list of positions. MAST users
can select a sample of astronomical sources based on a range of properties
(e.g., redshift, magnitude, radio flux for active nuclei) and then look for
the relevant entries in MAST. Work is in progress to expand this facility by
using NASA's Astronomical Data Center (ADC) interface. This will allow
cross-correlations to be made between MAST and any of the ADC catalogs and
tables, opening up new possibilities for the exploitation of MAST data.
Most MAST data are now stored at STScI. (See Abney & Richon (2000) for a
discussion of the HDA migration to magneto-optical media.) The MAST data
network consists of a SUN Enterprise 450 server, a large staging disk area,
and two Plasmon 480 platter CD-ROM jukeboxes. The migration of IUE data to
STScI is now completed and only EUVE data are not stored on-site (they
currently reside at HEASARC but are easily accessible through MAST).
Having most MAST data stored on-site allows direct data retrievals: selected
data are retrieved simply by clicking on the data set name. No username or
password is required. Data sets may be downloaded as .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.Z, or
.zip files. MAST has made every attempt to include sufficient documentation
and background information to make its data products as useful as
possible. Each mission generally includes a project description, details of
the data processing, data description (documentation, known problems, etc.),
and information on available software for data reduction. MAST also is the
prime software provider for many missions.
MAST will incorporate additional ultraviolet and optical archives in the
future, particularly those connected with NASA's missions. MAST will further
enhance the scientific value of its data holdings by seeking to archive data
from ground-based CCD mosaic imagers. Work is in progress to link HST datasets
with the publications which resulted from them. This will allow archival
researchers to have easy access to all HST-based papers from the HST WWW
interface. To fully exploit the multiwavelength parameter space which is being
made available also by the many large surveys completed and under way, MAST
will establish closer ties and coordination with other archive centers.
Within this framework, MAST will work towards providing the community with
``science-ready'' products. For example, data characterization and catalogs of
selected HST data would enable the identification of faint optical
counterparts of deep surveys at various wavelengths.
Acknowledgments
STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in
Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST
data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NAG5-7584 and
by other grants and contracts.
References
Abney, F. & Richon, J. 2000, this volume, 161
Footnotes
- ... Padovani1
- Affiliated to the Astrophysics Division, Space Science
Department, European Space Agency
© Copyright 2000 Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, California 94112, USA
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