New Services from the Chandra Data Archive

Users of the Chandra Data Archive (CDA) have been creating private mirrors of the archive for many years. The majority of the mirrors are partial mirrors of the CDA and most are not permanent. Maintaining a private mirror is not an easy task. The CDA is a dynamic archive which makes maintaining a private archive challenging and maintenance of many mirrors can put a strain on our servers, potentially impacting other users. To aid users in maintaining private mirrors, we have developed recipes and tools to create and fully maintain customized archives using a minimum of CDA resources. In conjunction with the new CDA services, several CIAO tools have been developed to work with private archives for retrieving data and determining the dataset identifiers associated with sets of files. In addition to tools for maintaining custom Chandra archives, the CDA is also publishing dynamic RSS feeds to provide announcements related to sets of observations which match requirements specified by the user. We hope users find these new services to be a beneficial part of the their research toolkit.