Astro Data Lab Overview: Mission, Data & Services

Astronomical surveys now routinely release terabytes of catalog data, and their image sets are measured in petabytes. Download, storage, and processing are out of reach for individual researchers and many organizations. The natural remedy to this data avalanche are Science Platforms, which combine data archive functions with co-located compute resources. Astro Data Lab, developed at the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) within NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) is one of the first fully-featured science platforms. We welcome professional astronomers and data scientists, students and educators, and citizen scientists. Our main mission is to provide open access to large survey data products, and to powerful data services through which all members of the community can conduct research at the forefront of astronomy. I will give an overview of the datasets and services offered by Astro Data Lab, and outline how together with their integration into the larger NOIRLab data ecosystem they enable world class research to anyone with a good idea and access to a web browser.