Mark Holliman

The VISTA Science Archive

We describe the VISTA Science Archive (VSA) and itsfirst public release of data from five of the six VISTA public surveys. The VSA exists to support the VISTA surveys through their lifecycle: the VISTA Public Survey consortia can use it during their quality control assessment of survey data products before submission to the ESO Science Archive Facility (ESO SAF); it supports their exploitation of survey data prior to its publication through the ESO SAF; and, subsequently, it provides the wider community with survey science exploitation tools that complement the data product repository functionality of the ESO SAF. This paper has been written in conjunction with the first public release of public survey data through the VSA and is designed to help its users understand the data products available and how the functionality of the VSA supports their varied science goals. We describe the design of the database and outline the database-driven curation processes that take data from nightly pipeline-processed and calibrated FITS files to create science-ready survey datasets. Much of this design, and the codebase implementing it, derives from our earlier WFCAM Science Archive (WSA), so this paper concentrates on the VISTA-specific aspects and on improvements made to the system in the light of experience gained in operating the WSA.

The Euclid Data Processing Challenges

Euclid is a Europe-led cosmology space mission dedicated to a visible and near infrared survey of the entire extra-galactic sky. Its purpose is to deepen our knowledge of the dark content of our Universe. After an overview of the Euclid mission and science, this contribution describes how the community is getting organized to face the data analysis challenges, both in software development and in operational data processing matters. It ends with a more specific account of some of the main contributions of the Swiss Science Data Center (SDC-CH).

Science Archives at the Wide Field Astronomy Unit

The Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (ROE) has been producing archives of astronomy data for more than a decade. It houses a collection of over 80 billion individual detections spread across five major astronomical surveys dating back over 60 years. As well as these surveys, we also host copies of external surveys to allow the cross-referencing of sources in our surveys with those detected with other instruments. This article details the data held by WFAU and the services we provide to our users.

Science Archives: Facilitating Survey Science

In this paper we discuss the role of science archives and data centres in supporting survey astronomy. We start by describing the work of the Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh, which in recent years has built science archives for the current large area and deep infrared surveys (UKIDSS and VISTA). We then go on to briefly discuss, in more general terms, how archives should operate and service the current and ever increasing volume of digital survey data.