Oral Abstract

Focus Demo (F1) Janet Evans (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)

High Impact Data Availability using Community Standards and Tools - the Chandra Experience

With 20 years of operations the Chandra X-ray Observatory has processed and archived 2 decades of science data, has built a Chandra Source Catalog consisting of ~315K sources, and has ~36 TB of data available to the science community. One of the data system challenges is to disseminate those data to a wide audience to encourage and enable as much scientific discovery as possible.

More recently, we have found IVOA standards and community tools have enabled us to provide a number of additional High Impact products to the community with minimal effort. Two examples are HiPS products of our archive data that provide interactive visualization of Chandra images and use of WWT where we have added a customized layer to provide an interactive interface to the Chandra Source Catalog.

These projects were relatively easy and within our scope to implement, have had big impact on the availability of Chandra data for science analysis, and are maintainable going forward. We will demo the interfaces recently added to the Chandra suite and highlight steps other projects interested in this path can take to implement them.