Robert Hanisch

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THE US NATIONAL VIRTUAL OBSERVATORY
The National Virtual Observatory Status, Plans,
Vision

• Robert Hanisch
• US NVO Project Manager
• Space Telescope Science Institute

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Astronomy is facing a data avalanche
1 microSky (DPOSS)
Multi-Terabyte (soon multi-Petabyte) sky surveys
and archives over a broad range of wavelengths
Billions of sources, hundreds of attributes per
source
1 nanoSky (HDF-S)
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The changing face of observational astronomy

• Large digital sky surveys are becoming dominant
  source of data in astronomy gt 100 TB, growing
  rapidly
• SDSS, 2MASS, DPOSS, GSC, FIRST, NVSS, RASS, IRAS,
  QUEST, GALEX, SST CMBR experiments Microlensing
  experiments NEAT, LONEOS, and other searches for
  Solar system objects
• Digital libraries ADS, astro-ph, NED, CDS, NSSDC
• Observatory archives HST, CXO, space and
  ground-based
• Future PanSTARRS, LSST, and other synoptic
  surveys astrometric missions, GW detectors
• Data sets orders of magnitude larger, more
  complex, more homogeneous than in the past
• Roughly 1 TB/Sky/band/epoch
• Human Genome is lt 1 GB, Library of Congress 20
  TB

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Toward a new astronomy

• Past Observations of small, carefully selected
  samples (often with a priori prejudices) of
  objects in one or a few wavelength bands

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Toward a new astronomy

• Future Multi-wavelength data for millions of
  objects, allowing us to
• Discover significant patterns from the analysis
  of statistically rich and unbiased image/catalog
  databases
• Understand complex astrophysical systems via
  confrontation between data and sophisticated
  numerical simulation

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Toward a new astronomy

• Discovering new phenomena and patterns in these
  datasets will require simultaneous access to
  multi-wavelength archives, advanced visualization
  and statistical analysis tools

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Motivation

• National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey
  recommended NVO as highest priority small
  (lt100M) project
• Several small initiatives recommended by the
  committee span both ground and space. The first
  among themthe National Virtual Observatory
  (NVO)is the committees top priority among the
  small initiatives. The NVO will provide a
  virtual sky based on the enormous data sets
  being created now and the even larger ones
  proposed for the future. It will enable a new
  mode of research for professional astronomers and
  will provide to the public an unparalleled
  opportunity for education and discovery.
• Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New
  Millennium, p. 14

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History

• 1990s NASA establishes wavelength-oriented
  science archive centers multiple large
  ground-based digital sky survey projects
  initiated (following 1988 Astrophysics Data
  System report)
• April 1999, Decadal Survey Panel on Theory,
  Computation, and Data Discovery met in Los Alamos
• Szalay, Prince, and Alcock coin the name
  National Virtual Observatory
• November 1999, NVO organizational workshop at JHU
• February 2000, 2nd NVO workshop at NOAO-Tucson
• June 2000, conference held at Caltech, Towards a
  Virtual Observatory
• June 2000, ad hoc steering committee formed
• February 2001, AASC/NAS report Astronomy and
  Astrophysics in the New Millennium released
• April 2001, proposal submitted to NSF ITR
  program, 17 collaborating organizations, led by
  A. Szalay (JHU)
• September 2001, NSF announces proposal selection
• January 2003, first NVO science prototypes shown
  at Seattle AAS

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The Virtual Observatory is

• A set of international standards to share complex
  data
• A modular set of tools to work with distributed
  data
• A simple environment to publish data to
• An essential part of the research astronomers
  toolkit
• A catalyst for world-wide access to astronomical
  archives
• A vehicle for education and public outreach

?

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The Virtual Observatory is not

• A replacement for building new telescopes and
  instruments
• A centralized repository for data
• A data quality enforcement organization

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Who is the National Virtual Observatory?

• US NVO development project, funded by NSF
  Information Technology Program and managed by NSF
  Astronomy Division, is entering 4th year of
  5-year project
• Funding is 10M over the 5 years
• 17 organizations (astro, CS, IT) involved
• JHU (PI Alex Szalay), STScI, Caltech (Astronomy,
  IPAC, CACR), HEASARC, SAO, NRAO, NOAO, NCSA,
  SDSC, FNAL, USNO, et al.
• Collaboration being extended to Gemini Science
  Archive (Aspin), LSST (Axelrod, Kantor), Keck
  (Conrad)

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Community and agency support

• External Advisory Committee has issued very
  positive reports (S. Wolff, J. Huchra, R.
  Kennicutt, R. Blandford, M. Haynes, T. Hey, C.
  Lagoze, S. Karin, P. Messina, E.
  Ostriker)
• Science Steering Committee advises on priorities
  and strategies for community up-take (G.
  Djorgovski, P. Pinto, M. Donahue, J. Ulvestad, F.
  Hill, B. Wilkes)
• NSF support is strong 100 renewal funding,
  carry-forward, and augmentations for
  international collaboration and Summer School
• National facilities providing more on-line
  archives and increasing VO compatibility
• NASA co-sponsored NVO Summer School, supports VO
  integration efforts at NASA data centers and
  various VO-related RD efforts through AISRP
  grants

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International collaboration

• NVO is co-founder of the
  International Virtual Observatory Alliance
• IVOA now has 15 member projects
• Adopted a standards process based on W3C
• Forum for discussion and sharing of experience
• IVOA and open archives endorsed by OECD
  (Organization for Economic Cooperation and
  Development) Global Science Forum report on The
  Management, Storage, and Utilization of
  Astronomical Data in the 21st Century
• IVOA created VO Event Working Group 11/22/2004
  to support transient event notification protocol
  development

http//ivoa.net
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Exposure

• NVO Summer School (Sept. 2004, Aspen) trained 40
  students and software developers in VO tools and
  technology
• Special Session at this AAS meeting Astronomical
  Research with the Virtual Observatory includes
  several papers based on Summer School projects
  (environments of radio galaxies, starburst
  galaxies)
• IAU Joint Discussion on Future Large Telescopes
  and the Virtual Observatory (July 2003, Sydney)
• IAU Symposium proposed for 2006 (Prague)

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Science prototypes

• Science demonstrations show capabilities of new
  infrastructure, motivate and guide technical
  developments. For example
• Data discovery, multi-? comparisons
• Search for brown dwarfs
• Galaxy morphologies in clusters
• Globular cluster simulations

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Science results

• Padovani et al. (2004)) demonstrates that VO
  tools are mature enough to produce cutting-edge
  science results by exploiting astronomical data
  beyond classical identification limits (R
  ? 25)

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Science results

• McGlynn et al. (2004) classified all unidentified
  ROSAT WGACAT objects using VO data access methods
  to cross-correlate multi-wavelength catalogs
• Technique applied to find candidate X-ray
  binaries and now to SDSS photometric catalog
• More than 400 papers related to virtual
  observatory in ADS

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NVO Registry Portal
Find source catalogs, image archives, and other
astronomical resources registered with the NVO
A Registry is a distributed database of Virtual
Observatory resources primarily access services
for catalog, image, and spectral data, but also
descriptions of organizations and data
collections. There are several coordinated
registry implementations that share information
by harvesting each other's resources. This
registry is at STScI in Baltimore, MD.
Searches for resources can be done by keyword, or
advanced queries can be expressed in the SQL
language. The registry is open for humans through
web forms, or machines through SOAP web services.
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DataScope
Discover and explore data in the Virtual
Observatory
Using the NVO DataScope scientists can discover
and explore hundreds of data resources available
in the Virtual Observatory. DataScope uses the
VO registry and VO access protocols to link to
archives and catalogs around the world. Users can
immediately discover what is known about a given
region of the sky they can view survey images
from the radio through the X-ray, explore
archived observations from multiple archives,
find recent articles describing analysis of data
in the region,
find known interesting or peculiar objects and
survey datasets that cover the region. A summary
page provides a quick précis of all of the
available data. Users can download images and
tables for further analysis on their local
machines, or they can go directly to a growing
set of VO enabled analysis tools, including
Aladin, OASIS, VOPlot and VOStat.
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OpenSkyQuery
Cross-match your data with numerous catalogs
OpenSkyQuery allows you to cross-match
astronomical catalogs and select subsets of
catalogs with a general and powerful query
language. You can also import a personal catalog
of objects and cross-match it against selected
databases.
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Spectrum Services
Search, plot, and retrieve SDSS, 2dF, and other
spectra
The Spectrum Services web site is dedicated to
spectrum related VO services. On this site you
will find tools and tutorials on how to access
close to 500,000 spectra from the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey (SDSS DR1) and the 2 degree Field
redshift survey (2dFGRS). The services are open
to everyone to publish their own spectra in the
same framework. Reading the tutorials on XML Web
Services, you can learn how to integrate the 45
GB spectrum and passband database with your
programs with few lines of code.
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Web Enabled Source Identification with
Cross-Matching (WESIX)
Upload images to SExtractor and cross-correlate
the objects found with selected survey catalogs.
This NVO service does source extraction and
cross-matching for any astrometric FITS image.
The user uploads a FITS image, and the remote
service runs the SExtractor software for source
extraction. The resulting catalog can be
cross-matched with any of several major surveys,
and the results returned as a VOTable. The web
page also allows use of Aladin or VOPlot to
visualize results.
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How to Publish to the NVO
Make your data collection available to others
The NVO is a powerful environment for locating
and integrating a wide variety of data
originating from many different instruments and
exploring many different research questions in
astronomy. But how does data get into that
environment in the first place? Data is exposed
to the NVO environment through a process called
publishing. This
"how-to" document is aimed anyone who has data
and would like to share it with the astronomy
community through the NVO. Remember, though, data
is not the only thing you can publishyou can
also publish services. That is, if you have a
piece of software that might be useful to others
and would like to make it accessible over the
network, publishing it as a service makes it
possible for other NVO applications to make use
of it.
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Future VO-enabled science

• January 2005 software release in conjunction
  with AAS, international data access through
  standard registries
• January 2005 AVO demos focusing on dynamic
  generation of SEDs for galaxies and comparisons
  with stellar spectral evolution models, and
  search for stars in transition from AGB to PN
  (unidentified IR sources)
• TeraGrid-based analyses (CPU time already
  allocated) standard sky atlas spatial sampling
  and data federation, galaxy SED fitting, image
  mosaicing, quasar spectral modeling, N-point
  correlation function for SDSS galaxies, CMB
  modeling

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Future VO-enabled science

• NVO applications for 2005-2006 TBD in
  consultation with Science Steering Committee
• Dynamic time series analysis, period fitting
• VO-Google
• Fast data inventory service
• Flux-recovery service
• Image registration and subtraction services
• VO integration with legacy software systems (web
  service interfaces, data access)
• Datamining and data federation on increasingly
  large, distributed databases

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Education and Outreach

• NVO recognized as excellent vehicle for education
  and public outreach
• NVO EPO Coordinator (C. Christian) developing
  partnerships
• Virtual Cosmos portal (UC Berkeley, STScI, NOAO,
  ESO), NASA AISRP funded
• Adler Planetarium CyberSpace
• Learning Technologies WorldWind, NASA Ames
• NVO/SDSS Pre-College Curriculum Support
  (http//virtualobservatory.org)
• Project Lite (Boston University), NSF funded
  (http//lite.bu.edu/)
• Planning second EPO workshop for Summer 2005

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Ear to the ground

• NSF and NASA working to create joint program
  draft RFP could be available as soon as next
  spring
• Agency support appears firm, but not assured
• Continuing to build community support from the
  ground up
• Demonstrations
• Software releases
• Summer School
• EPO partnerships

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Next steps

• Submitted white paper The National Virtual
  Observatory From Framework to Facility to NSF
  and NASA this past summer
• Suggests responsibilities and scope for eventual
  NVO operational (distributed) facility
• Suggests smaller, tighter collaboration
• Describes several possible management models,
  advocates management by consortium
• Urges creation of joint NSF/NASA/other program to
  provide single point of contact for funding
• Ramp up to 4M/year covers continuing
  development, standards, integration, testing,
  user support, documentation, web site, data
  curation, EPO, and management 3M/year
  suggested for sponsored research and fellowships

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Summary

• 10M committed in US, gt40M worldwide, to VO
  development
• Active international community is working and
  meeting regularly to establish the VO
• Major archives and catalogs available through the
  VO and more coming
• First public tools and applications now available
  for community use
• Refereed research papers utilizing the VO now
  beginning to appear

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