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Proceedings Paper

The ALMA archive and its place in the astronomy of the future
Author(s): Felix Stoehr; Mark Lacy; Stephane Leon; Erik Muller; Alisdair Manning; Christophe Moins; Dustin Jenkins
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Paper 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.

Paper Details

Date Published: 28 July 2014
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 9149, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems V, 914902 (28 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055539
Show Author Affiliations
Felix Stoehr, European Southern Observatory (Germany)
Mark Lacy, National Radio Astronomy Observatory (United States)
Stephane Leon, Joint ALMA Observatory (Chile)
Erik Muller, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (Japan)
Alisdair Manning, European Southern Observatory (Germany)
Christophe Moins, European Southern Observatory (Germany)
Dustin Jenkins, Canadian Astronomy Data Ctr. (Canada)


Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9149:
Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems V
Alison B. Peck; Chris R. Benn; Robert L. Seaman, Editor(s)

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