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Pierfederici, F., Benvenuti, P., Micol, A., Pirenne, B., & Wicenec, A. 2001, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 238, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems X, eds. F. R. Harnden, Jr., F. A. Primini, & H. E. Payne (San Francisco: ASP), 141
ASTROVIRTEL: Accessing Astronomical Archives as Virtual Telescopes
F. Pierfederici, P. Benvenuti, A. Micol,
B. Pirenne, A. Wicenec
ST-ECF, Garching bei Munchen, Germany
Abstract:
We present here
ASTROVIRTEL:
a project supported by the European
Commission within the ``Enhanced Access to Research Infrastructures'' action.
ASTROVIRTEL is already being used by European astronomers as a Virtual Telescope,
enabling them to access a huge amount of astronomical data with the support of
the ASTROVIRTEL personnel.
At the same time, operating ASTROVIRTEL--that is, being involved in the definition
of the user requirements, and in the implementation of the necessary tools--
is an ideal way to get acquainted with the scientific drivers and the technology
required to build a Virtual Observatory.
The ASTROVIRTEL Project is supported for a three year period by the European
Commission (EC), within the ``Enhanced Access to Research
Infrastructures'' action
of the ``Improving Human Potential & the Socio-economic Knowledge
Base'' section of
the EU Fifth Framework Programme.
It is managed by the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF)
on behalf of ESA and ESO and is aimed at improving the scientific return of
the ESO/ST-ECF Archive.
European users can
exploit ASTROVIRTEL as a Virtual Telescope, retrieving and analyzing large quantities
of data with the assistance of the Archive operators and personnel.
In addition to serving the scientific community directly, the
Project will be used to define the scientific requirements for
a more comprehensive and sophisticated multi-wavelength Virtual Observatory.
Although individual grants cannot be funded under the current scheme (``Enhanced Access to Research
Infrastructures''), we believe that the strength of
ASTROVIRTEL is to be found in the support, both in terms of manpower and
of computing power, that it is able to offer to its users.
Once a submitted proposal has been accepted by the scientific review panel
and has been judged technically feasible, its
investigators are invited to ESO for a period of one to two days.
The aim of this preliminary visit is to understand the requirements of the
scientific program.
Once that has been achieved, work on the program starts. The role of
the ASTROVIRTEL team at this stage is similar to that of a team of assistant
astronomers at an observatory on a mountain, i.e., to offer help and consulting
in data mining and retrieval, data reduction, and software development.
Moreover, investigators can store and process their data using the
computing facilities available at ESO, if the tasks are too demanding
for the resources of their home institutions.
Another strength of the ASTROVIRTEL project is its ability to
help investigators access, retrieve and process data residing in archives and
data bases not housed at ESO. These include ISO, CFHT, ING, and MAST.
The ASTROVIRTEL Cycle I Call-for-Proposal deadline was June 15, 2000. By that date
a number of proposals were submitted, out of which five were accepted by the science review
panel and by the technical feasibility team. The accepted proposals,
listed below, are publicly
available on the web from the ASTROVIRTEL home page:
- D. Burgarella, ``A quantitative Approach of Rest-Frame Ultraviolet
Morphology'',
- D. Egret, ``Multi-wavelength Cross-identification of Star Catalogues
towards the Magellanic Clouds'',
- G. Hahn, ``Search for Precovery Images of Near-Earth Asteroids in the
ESO Schmidt Plate Archive'',
- S. Smartt, ``From galaxy formation to supernovae - stellar populations
in resolved galaxies'',
- C. Zwintz, ``Asteroseismology with the HST Fine Guidance Sensors''.
The present cycle will be followed by two other calls for proposals;
one every year,
with deadlines, probably, at the beginning of the summer. It is intended
that
work on accepted proposals will be concluded in one year's time, in order to avoid
work-load pile-ups.
The following resources are already available to ASTROVIRTEL PIs:
- ESO/ST-ECF archive:
1 million observations (HST and ESO data),
8.0TB of scientific data,
growth rate: 5TB/year,
one big robotized jukebox with 1100 DVD slots and 6 DVD drives,
two jukeboxes with 670 DVD disks each,
on the fly calibration pipelines for HST data, and
on the fly calibration of VLT data (soon).
- Catalogues and survey data access:
GSC1 and GSC2,1Tycho-2,2Hipparcos,3USNO A2.0,4IUE final archive (INES),5DSS1 and DSS2 red, blue and IR,6the HST Hubble Deep Fields,
ESO Imaging Survey (EIS),
NTT SUSI Deep Field (NDF) and SOFI Infrared Images of the NTT Deep Field,
Science Verification and Commissioning Data from the VLT and WFI,
HST NICMOS and STIS parallel observations,
ESO Schmidt Plates Collection, and
ESO Lauberts and Valentijn Images.
- Computing power:
two Beowulf systems
(1 master + 9 nodes each,
10 times faster than state of the art quad-processors servers on
WFI (wide field imager) reduction pipelines,
8 x 36 GB fiber channel RAID each,
Gigabit network switches),
state of the art SUN workstations, and
Alpha VMS systems.
- Manpower:
dedicated personnel to assist ASTROVIRTEL PIs,
in-house development of data mining tools,
search and retrieval of datasets not available in-house (ISO, CFHT,
MAST, etc.),
support for reduction and analysis of the data, and
ASTROVIRTEL can take advantage of the extra expertise available
within ESO.
One important goal of the ASTROVIRTEL project is to enhance
the ESO/ST-ECF archives by making tools
developed for any of its approved proposals publicly available. This
will empower the whole
astronomical community with new and more powerful browsing/data mining tools,
dedicated reduction/analysis pipelines, and real cross-archive
interoperability.
Another important goal of ASTROVIRTEL is to understand the requirements
of tomorrow's Virtual Observatories. This implies an understanding of the scientific
drivers of a Virtual Observatory as well as of the technology it needs.
Handling in a technically efficient and scientifically meaningful way several
interconnected multi-wavelength (and multi-instrument) archives is an
ambitious task that constitutes the core of the VOs.
ASTROVIRTEL aims at tackling this very problem by making use of the experience
gained during its years of operation.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Martin Kornmesser for the nice pictures he contributed to our poster.
Footnotes
- ... GSC2,1
- Space Telescope Science Institute
- ...Tycho-2,2
- Copenhagen University Observatory and ESA, 2000
- ...Hippar\-cos,3
- ESA, 1997
- ... A2.0,4
- US Naval Observatory, 1998
- ... (INES),5
- ESA, 1999
- ... IR,6
- 1993, 1994,
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Next: PICsIM - the INTEGRAL/IBIS/PICsIT Observation Simulation Tool for Prototype Software Evaluation
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