ROSAT Status Report #36:
Nov 16, 1992
The US ROSAT Public Data Archive Opens
The US ROSAT Public Data Archive (USRPDA), located at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, officially opened on 1 November 1992. The USRPDA will eventually contain all US, UK, and German data obtained by ROSAT during the pointed observing phase, as well as non-proprietary calibration data. The USRPDA, whose contents mirror that of the German and UK ROSAT Public Data Archives, contains the housekeeping information, photon event lists, and non-background-subtracted images (in FITS and Postscript format) that were distributed to PIs one year earlier.
The data contained in the USRPDA provides the necessary information to allow users to generate valid science results through off-line analysis. However, by international agreement, this version of the public data archive does not contain "science results" generated by the standard processing software (SASS). This means, for example, that source positions, count rates, spectra, and light curves generated by SASS (and distributed to the PI) are not included. A "ROSAT Results Archive", to be developed through a joint effort of the US, German, and UK archive centers, will become the repository of SASS-generated science products.
An ASCII text file describing how users of the USRPDA can identify and access public ROSAT data is available via anonymous ftp to heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov: "cd" to "DATA/rosat/documents", and "get" the file: "/archive_intro.txt". A version of this file will appear as an article in the upcoming issue of the ROSAT Newsletter and in the HEASARC journal Legacy. Its Table of Contents is as follows:
1 Introduction 2 Accessing ROSAT Public Data 2.1 Data identification 2.1.1 Via anonymous ftp 2.1.2 Via MIPS 2.1.3 Via BROWSE 2.1.4 A Caveat 2.2. Data Request 2.2.1 VMS user via NSI-DECnet 2.2.2 Unix user via Internet 2.3 Data retrieval 3 Other Issues 3.1 A word about multiple releases of data 3.2 Future Events 3.2.1 Use of BROWSE to display products 3.2.2 Generating ARMS e-mail requests automatically using BROWSE 3.2.3 Generating ARMS e-mail requests automatically using MIPS 4 Further Information
In addition, reprints of this article can be obtained by request from :
Dr. Michael F. Corcoran Code 668 Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD 20771 corcoran@heasrc.gsfc.nasa.gov HEASRC::CORCORAN
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