Hubble in the Cloud
Abstract
The Hubble Space Telescope has undeniably expanded our understanding of the universe during its 28 years in space so far, but this is not just due to its superior view from space: One of the major advantages to Hubble is that every single image it takes becomes public within six months (and in many cases immediately) after it is beamed back to Earth. The treasure trove that is the Hubble archive has produced just as many discoveries by scientists using the data "second hand" as it has from the original teams who requested the observations. In May, 2018 we announced that ~110 TB of Hubble's archival observations are available in cloud storage on Amazon Web Services which provides unlimited access to the data right next to a wide variety of computing resources. These data consist of all raw and processed observations from the currently active instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS). The data on AWS (available at https://registry.opendata.aws/hst/) are kept up to date with the data held in MAST and new and reprocessed data are updated on AWS within 20 minutes of them being updated at MAST. The combination of cloud computing with one of the highest value dataset in astronomy has the potential to yield new scientific discoveries. In this poster we report on the process of uploading the data and the technical decsions we made. We discuss the use of the data in the first six months since the upload and present example use cases for archival exploration leveraging the wide range of AWS services.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #233
- Pub Date:
- January 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AAS...23345706M