archive release notes The release of v1.0 of the Science Data Archive (SDA) user interface (UI) coincides with the 2002 ACS GTO science team meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A demonstration of the UI will be given at the Wyoming meeting on Monday, 30 July 2002. User support will be available throughout the meeting. Described below are the hardware and software requirements for efficient use of v1.0, the basic functionality of v1.0, the known limitations of v1.0, and the planned improvements for the next release.
There are no specific hardware requirements for operating the UI. Any computer that accommodates efficient WWW browsing will be sufficient for basic UI functionality. However, computers should have sufficient memory and processing speed to display and manipulate drizzled WFC images.
The UI is a WWW-based interface to the SDA database and image storage media (RAID). The UI has been designed with strict adherence to the XHTML and DOM HTML (through JavaScript/ECMAscript bindings) standards, so it will perform well with any WWW browser that fully supports these standards. The recommended browsers for the UI are (in order of preference):
The UI utilizes PNG format graphics, which are not properly rendered by Internet Explorer browsers. This problem is well documented and petitions to correct it have so far been ignored by Microsoft Corporation.
Netscape 4.7x (for any platform) and Internet Explorer 5.x (for Windows and Unix) do not properly execute the UI and are therefore not supported by the ACS archive group.
Proper use of the UI requires the following browser options be set:
These options are default settings on most browsers. For Mozilla and Netscape, they are changed via the "Edit Preferences" menu option --> "Advanced" category --> "Scripts and Windows" subcategory.
Finally, a FITS image viewer must be installed to properly display FITS images through the UI. Such viewers include:
To enable your browser to spawn the FITS viewer, edit your browser preferences to include a MIME type of "image/x-fits" for extension "fits" and the correct path to the executable for the FITS viewer.
The UI has two basic functions:
Both functions are accessible from a common UI. The UI is designed with a tabbed format, meaning that the basic steps of any archive query (defining search criteria, selecting output fields, and viewing results) are accessed through a tabbed menu. Once a search type (images or objects) is selected, the UI restricts the user to options relevant to that selected search.
The SDA stores selected images generated by CALACS and APSIS. The CALACS images are produced by on-the-fly calibration through MAST. Only the calibrated FLT and CRJ files, which are the input products of APSIS, are stored in the SDA. All other CALACS files must be retrieved through MAST. The APSIS image products that are stored in the SDA are:
File queries are defined using CALACS header keywords or parameters produced by the align module of APSIS. All archived CALACS and APSIS images can be downloaded through the UI and/or displayed with standard FITS image viewers spawned by the WWW browser. The ancestors and descendents of each archived image can be traced, thereby providing the user a pedigree of every archived APSIS run.
Objects in each GTO image are identified and characterized photometrically, astrometrically, morphologically, and cosmologically by APSIS. The object catalogs generated by APSIS (detection, filter, multicolor, and BPZ) queries are formed by constraining selected parameters from each of these catalogs.
The UI offers several tools for inspecting and analyzing the results of object queries. Those included in v1.0 are:
The GTO team requires the UI to support many complex functions (file retrieval, object catalog queries, graphical representation of data) for a diverse archive of data collected from different combinations of telescopes, instruments, and filters. Satisfying these complex requirements and the GTO team's desire to access the data in a timely fashion requires that the UI be developed and released incrementally with increasing degrees of sophistication and functionality. While v1.0 satisfies the basic expectations of the UI, there are some limitations to the features described above. They are:
Users are warned that the data presently stored in the SDA are based on the calibrated images currently available through MAST. These images have been calibrated by CALACS without finalized reference files (and no L flats) and with preliminary photometric and astrometric calibrations. Therefore, the scientific merit of the data at the time of this release must be assessed by the users of the SDA.
Incremental releases of the UI are planned on a monthly basis. Planned improvements for v1.1 include, but are not limited to:
