The Herschel Science Archive at the ASDC Multi-Mission Interactive Archive

Abstract

The science archive of the Herschel Space Observatory at the ASCD is conceived for including public high level products of the Herschel mission within the structure of the ASDC Multi-Mission Interactive Archive (MMIA). High level products are scientific products (Level 2) and they are available to the users in formats (FITS, ASCII tables) that can be directly used for scientific analysis without further processing steps. The users access to the scientific products through an user-friendly web interfaces, which does not assumes a particular knowledge about the satellite, the on-board instruments and the related observing modes. Scientific products are firstly Standard Level 2 products, which are released by the HSC. The Standard products are obtained by performing queries at HSA using jython scripts developed within the HIPE environments. The Level 2 Standard Products are extracted from the Observational Context and are archived in the section of the Multi-Mission Interactive Archived dedicated at the Herschel data. Together with the standard products extracted from the HSA, an observation can present reprocessed products obtained by using both the standard pipelines, which are released by the HSC, and non-standard pipelines, which are developed outside the ICC and that are currently available at the ASDC. The reprocessing is aimed for optimizing the final products in the case of specific observing modes. The standard recipes are used for combining observations acquired in large map photometric modes with the PACS and SPIRE instruments, and for performing further processing steps on HIFI spectra, in order to improve the quality of the final results. Non-standard pipeline are developed by the astronomical community with the purpose of obtaining scientific products with increased quality with respect to the standard pipeline. The efforts have been mainly focused in reducing large photometric maps obtained using PACS and SPIRE instruments. Two non-standard pipelines are currently available at the ASDC that can be used to populate the archive: "Scanamorphos" (Roussel, H. 2011, submitted to A & A), and "Romagal" (Traficante, A. 2011, MNRAS submitted). Scanamorphos is a pipeline already released to the community, while Romagal is still a private code, since it is in a optimization phase, and the ASDC actively contributes to the development and maintenance of the code. The Herschel Team at the ASDC is in charge of developing the scripts able to produce the archive and the auxiliary files, together with the statements necessary for developing the web interfaces to the Herschel archive and for correctly performing the queries to the database. The development environment, where the the data archive is created and tested, is set in the virtual machine vmherschel64bit; whenever the archive is ready to be released, it is exported to the server mysql by using the technical support provide by Telspazio. This document is intended to provide a complete description of the Herschel Science Archive at the ASDC and the implementation of scientific data within the MMIA. Therefore, the Herschel instruments and, in particular, the observing modes associated are not described in details and they are reported without further explanations. It is remanded to the Observer Manuals (see bibliograpy) for having detailed information about observing capabilities of the scientific instruments.