The HEASARC in the 2020s
Abstract
The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) is NASA's primary archive for high energy astrophysics and cosmic microwave background (CMB) data, supporting the broad science goals of NASA's Physics of the Cosmos theme. It provides vital scientific infrastructure to the community by standardizing science data formats and analysis programs, providing open access to NASA resources, and implementing powerful archive interfaces. These enable multimission studies of key astronomical targets, and deliver a major cost savings to NASA and proposing mission teams in terms of a reusable science infrastructure, as well as a time savings to the astronomical community through not having to learn a new analysis system for each new mission. The HEASARC archive holdings are currently in excess of 100 TB, supporting seven active missions (Chandra, Fermi, INTEGRAL, NICER, NuSTAR, Swift, and XMM-Newton), and providing continuing access to data from over 40 missions that are no longer in operation. HEASARC scientists are also engaged with the upcoming IXPE and XARM missions, and with many other Probe, Explorer, SmallSat, and CubeSat proposing teams. Within the HEASARC, the LAMBDA CMB thematic archive provides a permanent archive for NASA mission data from WMAP, COBE, IRAS, SWAS, and a wide selection of suborbital missions and experiments, and hosts many other CMB-related datasets, tools, and resources. In this talk I will summarize the current activities of the HEASARC and our plans for the coming decade. In addition to mission support, we will expand our software and user interfaces to provide astronomers with new capabilities to access and analyze HEASARC data, and continue to work with our Virtual Observatory partners to develop and implement standards to enable improved interrogation and analysis of data regardless of wavelength regime, mission, or archive boundaries. The future looks bright for high energy astrophysics, and the HEASARC looks forward to continuing its central role in the community.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #232
- Pub Date:
- June 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AAS...23221407S