sci18006 — Announcement

A new Hubble Archive mirror in Europe

17 December 2018

In June 2018 a new mirror of the Hubble archive at STScI was opened to the public in Europe. Hosted at the ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC) in the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) near Madrid, this represents the culmination of almost two years of effort by scientists and engineers from the ESDC, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC). These three partners worked together within the Hubble Space Telescope Consolidation of Pipelines project to ensure that the Hubble archives at all three data centres share a common data model and the exact same data products. ESA’s Hubble archive has been re-engineered in order to accommodate this ultimate change with minimum impact for its users.

As a result, ESA’s new Hubble Space Telescope Science Archive (eHST) now provides access to exactly the same data as the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at STScI. Prior versions of this archive hosted locally reprocessed data products, so from version 2.0 users can be confident that products downloaded from eHST are identical to those in MAST and at the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC). In addition, users may also benefit from the eHST’s user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, including Virtual Observatory (VO) interoperability protocols, as well as the option to query the archive via a simple and well-documented command-line interface.

The eHST has been developed following the common approach within the ESDC, leading to a more robust archive, easy to maintain and to extend. This allows users to exploit all the Hubble science archive data collections in many flavours, visualise the Hubble Source Catalog on top of the images and explore them more globally from a multi-wavelength point of view in ESASky.

The current collection contains all public standard-processed data from the active Hubble instruments (ACS, COS, STIS, WFC3) and from the legacy instruments (FOC, FOS, HRS, NICMOS, WFPC, WFPC2). Access to the Hubble Source Catalogue (v2.1) is available too. Plans for the near future include extending to the eHST the splendid Hubble data treasury available for the scientific community.

If you have any question or suggestion for how to make these data services more useful or engaging to both scientists and citizens in general, please contact the eHST helpdesk at hsthelp@sciops.esa.int.