Luisa Rebull is a Research Scientist at the Spitzer Science Center at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech. She is the Archive Scientist for Spitzer, and has been working on the development of the Spitzer Heritage Achive.
There are two important recent developments in the Spitzer world: (1) the handover to IRSA of the Archive, and (2) the recent release of version 2.0 of the Spitzer Heritage Archive.
The IRSA handover
The Spitzer project has reached a major milestone in the completion of the Spitzer cryogenic mission. Since the end of the cryogenic mission in May 2009, the Spitzer Science Center (SSC) has been conducting the final data processing of all cryogenic mission data and these data are now available in the Spitzer Heritage Archive at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC). IRSA is responsible for the long-term curation of the Spitzer mission science data, tools and documentation. In addition to curation of the data, IRSA now has responsibility for the cryogenic mission science user support.
The Spitzer cryogenic mission website is now available here, at IRSA. The Spitzer Science Center’s active warm mission website, as well as links to the cryogenic mission pages at IRSA, remains here, at the SSC. Based on the resources available at the SSC and IRSA, science user support tasks are similarly divided — SSC for IRAC warm and cryogenic mission support and IRSA for all MIPS and IRS support. Questions sent to either the SSC or IRSA Helpdesks will be routed to the appropriate person at the SSC or IRSA.
Spitzer Heritage Archive (SHA) version 2.0
This new version of the SHA includes:
- Access to the Legacy Enhanced Data products — try the “Inventory search” on the bottom of the left hand side of the search page.
- Recall that the Legacy projects were large, coherent observing programs, which included delivery back to the SSC of enhanced data products such as mosaics and catalogs; some teams delivered considerable ancillary data at other bandpasses as well. Any delivered enhanced products from the Legacy teams are available as simple (non-interactively searchable) files on the SSC website (click on ‘data deliveries’ for any team at the link above) or as searchable individual repositories at IRSA within the Gator or ATLAS services. Now they are also searchable through the SHA interface as an “Inventory Search.”
- Automatically generated download scripts for downloading and unzipping many zip files at once, in a hands-off fashion.
- If your packaging request generates more than one zipfile, you are given an option to generate a download script when the packaging is complete.
- VAO-compliant application program interface (API) for all image data; extracted spectra will be available via the API in a future version.
- When you first go to the page, you are dropped directly into a position search (fewer clicks to get searching quickly).
- A side effect of this is that you may need to reload the SHA page entirely (try clicking on that link) and/or clear your browser cache if you were working in the SHA before 9 March.
- Many fixed bugs from version 1.5. (See the bugs list.)
- The online help has been updated. Also new with this version is a standalone PDF SHA manual, and brief instructional videos. These are available from here.
Questions?
Questions? Problems? Bugs? Suggestions? You can reach us at the IRSA Helpdesk or the Spitzer Helpdesk.