Community-Contributed Datasets: Recent and Future Advances at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telesco
At the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), High-Level Science Products (HLSPs) consist of over 150 datasets based on mission data, but enhanced and contributed back by the astronomical community. HLSPs include some of the most popular MAST holdings, spanning virtually all supported programs. This poster will present some of the approaches for enhancing the accessibility and productivity of the full breadth of MAST HLSPs. Some HLSPs hew closely to common mission data structures, enabling simple, automated methods to ingest them and make them available in a wide array of community-facing services, such as catalog services, the MAST Portal, and Astroquery.MAST. Other HLSPs are so heterogeneous or so distant from mission observations that automated ingest is impractical, reducing their accessibility, and yet their importance to the community may be very high. In addition, because of their archival value, recent MAST-supported survey missions Kepler and TESS have seen some of the strongest demand for creating and accessing HLSPs, spanning comparable volume to the original mission data. Finally, by tracking HLSP usage, we have gained some hints about likely community demand for accessing larger, more homogeneous survey datasets to be taken by the WFIRST mission and developed in collaboration with the science community. The high demand for accessing HST HLSPs implies that future demand for WFIRST mission data and HLSPs will be very high. Thus, MAST and our partners are working hard to learn how to support community-contributed products far into the future.
