NOAO Surveys & Data Products: Coming Attractions...
Autor: Chris Smith
NOAO / CTIO + NGSC
The combination of profound new astronomical discoveries
and a growing realization of the enormous potential for even bigger
future breakthroughs based on rapidly advancing technologies have led
to an explosion of investment in a new generation of ground-based telescopes
and instrumentation. Many of these breakthroughs will come not from
the traditional proposal and object-oriented science, but rather from
mining large datasets collected either from individual surveys or from
facilities specifically designed to produce datasets for the community.
NOAO is rapidly evolving to incorporate this new vision by building
upon its strengths to embrace new roles in providing not only telescope
time, but data products to the astronomical community.
Our initial plans involve moving current NOAO-based surveys,
including the NOAO Deep-Wide Field Survey and the Magellanic Cloud Emission-line
Survey, into public archives for community access. Data from other NOAO
survey projects will be incorporated as those projects make them available.
These efforts will form the core of our work to produce a ground-based
"node" of the National Virtual Observatory. Longer-term plans involve
developing pipelines for data from all NOAO telescopes and contributing
to data management plans for the LSST, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,
which will produce terabytes of imaging data *each night* for exploration
of time-variable phenomena and moving objects as well as deep imaging
applications.
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