Space Data Archives & Open Science
Every discovery on this platform rests on data someone archived, in a format someone standardised, findable through a protocol someone agreed on. This is that hidden infrastructure — the archives that hold the observations of the world's telescopes, the formats that let the data be shared, and the practices that make it findable, citable, and reusable.
Explore the infrastructure
- The Science Archives
Where the data lives — the great archives that hold and serve the observations of the world's telescopes and surveys.
10 entries - Data Standards
The formats that let data be shared — FITS, VOTable, and the standards astronomy is built on.
3 entries - The Virtual Observatory
The interoperability framework and the access protocols that make the world's archives searchable as one — TAP, Cone Search, and the query standards of the Virtual Observatory.
5 entries - Open Science
The practices that make data usable and trustworthy — pipelines, identifiers, citation, and reproducibility.
5 entries
The science archives
- ALMA Science ArchiveData archiveOperated by ESO, NRAO & NAOJ
The archive of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the great international millimetre-wave observatory, preserving its observations of cold gas, dust, and the discs where planets form.
- CDSData archive
The Strasbourg astronomical Data Centre, a cornerstone of open astronomy that operates the SIMBAD and VizieR services and helped build the Virtual Observatory, tying the world's catalogues and object databases together.
- ESA Science ArchivesData archiveOperated by ESA
ESA's science-data archives, hosted at the European Space Astronomy Centre, holding the observations of Europe's astronomy and planetary missions — from Gaia and XMM-Newton to Mars Express and Euclid.
- ESO Science ArchiveData archiveOperated by ESO
The archive of the European Southern Observatory, holding the data of its ground-based telescopes in Chile — the Very Large Telescope and its partners — for reuse by astronomers worldwide.
- HEASARCData archiveOperated by NASA/GSFC
NASA's archive for high-energy astrophysics — the X-ray and gamma-ray data of missions like Chandra, Swift, and Fermi — a central resource for the study of the most energetic objects in the universe.
- IRSAData archiveOperated by Caltech/IPAC
NASA's archive for infrared and submillimetre astronomy — the data of Spitzer, WISE, 2MASS, and Herschel among others — operated by IPAC at Caltech.
- MASTData archiveOperated by STScI
NASA's archive for the data of its optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared space telescopes — Hubble, JWST, TESS, Kepler, and more — operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute. One of the most-used archives in astronomy.
- NEDData archiveOperated by Caltech/IPAC
A database that gathers everything known about objects beyond the Milky Way — positions, redshifts, images, and the literature — cross-linking millions of galaxies and quasars across all the surveys that have observed them.
- SIMBADData archiveOperated by CDS
A database of astronomical objects beyond the Solar System, collecting the names, identifiers, measurements, and references for millions of stars and galaxies so that any object can be looked up and cross-identified across the literature.
- VizieRData archiveOperated by CDS
The most complete library of published astronomical catalogues, letting anyone query tens of thousands of catalogues and data tables in a uniform way — the reference source for catalogue data.
Data & provenance
Each archive, data standard, Virtual Observatory protocol, and open-science practice is a first-class knowledge-graph entity resolved through the Scientific Data Engine, reusing the operating organisations, the telescopes and surveys whose data the archives hold, the calibration method, the Harvard classification, and VOEvent already in the graph. Curated from NASA, ESA, and the archive operators themselves. See source quality.