Abstract

The Design of the Spitzer Space Telescope Heritage Archive

Deborah Levine (IPAC, Caltech)

Xiuqin Wu, John Good, Anastasia Alexov, Bruce Berriman, Peter Capak, Steve Groom, Tom Handley, J. Davy Kirkpatrick, Mark Lacy, Mark Legassie, Russ Laher, Seppo Laine, Loi Ly, Trey Roby (IPAC, Caltech)

It is predicted that Spitzer Space Telescope’s cryogen will run out in April 2009, and the final reprocessing for the cryogenic mission is scheduled to end in April 2011, at which time the Spitzer archive will be transferred to the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) for long-term curation. The Spitzer Science Center (SSC) and IRSA are collaborating to design and deploy the Spitzer Space Telescope Heritage Archive, which will supersede the current Spitzer archive. It will initially contain the raw and final re-processed cryogenic science products, and will eventually incorporate the final products from the Warm mission. The Heritage Archive will be accompanied by tools deemed necessary to extract the full science content of the archive and by comprehensive documentation. This presentation will describe the software design of the archive, which integrates the data sets into the current IRSA infrastructure, and at the same time offers powerful tools that allow users to explore the full range of scientific content of the Spitzer data sets.

New AJAX web technologies will be used to provide the user with more functionality to manipulate result sets and related data within the archive interface. Historically, archive interfaces have supported basic data location and sub-setting but have been weaker at more involved tasks such as drill-down, data selection, and interactive visualization. Using new web tools and techniques it is now feasible to make a web browser interface much more powerful. In particular, the Spitzer Archive web site will implement advanced table manipulation and FITS visualization. The web based FITS viewer will be an AJAX based tool with functionality similar to installed applications, such as interactive pixel value/coordinate readout and manipulation of display parameters. The display will be melded seamlessly with fully scalable server-side DBMS technology.

Specialized tools are also being developed on the server end to provide extremely fast spatial searches for both catalog and image coverage data. Based on R-Tree indexing, these tools were originally developed for the National Virtual Observatory and have been used there for pan-archive inventory searches. Both these toolkits will be both general and portable. IRSA plans to use the table interaction toolkit with all its tabular result sets and the spatial indexing software will be part of an upcoming IRSA release.

Mode of presentation: oral