Understanding Space Data Archives & Open Science
Where astronomy's data lives and how it is shared — the archives that hold the observations of the world's telescopes, the formats that let the data be shared, the Virtual Observatory that makes them searchable as one, and the open-science practices that make results findable, citable, and reusable. Curated from NASA, ESA, ESO, and the archive operators; nothing is fabricated.
- 3.1The Virtual Observatory frameworkThe IVOA standards that tie the archives together.
- 3.2Data pipelines & calibrationRaw detector counts become science-ready data.
- 3.3The ADS literature serviceThe digital library that indexes all of astronomy.
- 3.4Reproducibility & FAIR dataFindable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable.
Related entities
- Data archive
MAST
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.
- Data standard
FITS
The universal file format of astronomy — a self-describing container for images, tables, and spectra with a human-readable header of metadata. In use since the 1980s and still the standard way astronomical data is stored and shared.
- Virtual Observatory framework
The Virtual Observatory
The framework of standards, coordinated by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, that lets the world's archives be searched and combined as if they were one — so an astronomer can query every telescope's data at once. TAP, Cone Search, VOEvent, and VOTable are among its standards.
- Open-science practice
Reproducibility & FAIR Data
The principles that make science trustworthy and reusable — data that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), open archives, documented pipelines, and citable datasets — so that a result can be checked and built upon by anyone.