Building a VO-compliant Radio Astronomical DAta Model for Single-dish radio telescopes (RADAMS)

The Virtual Observatory (VO) is becoming the de-facto standard for astronomical data publication. However, the number of radio astronomical archives is still low in general, and even lower is the number of radio astronomical data available through the VO. In order to facilitate the building of new radio astronomical archives, easing at the same time their interoperability with VO framework, we have developed a VO-compliant data model which provides interoperable data semantics for radio data. That model, which we call the Radio Astronomical DAta Model for Single-dish (RADAMS) has been built using standards of (and recommendations from) the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). This article describes the RADAMS and its components, including archived entities and their relationships to VO metadata. We show that by using IVOA principles and concepts, the effort needed for both the development of the archives and their VO compatibility has been lowered, and the joint development of two radio astronomical archives have been possible. We plan to adapt RADAMS to be able to deal with interferometry data in the future.     

基于虚拟天文台的HXMT卫星数据检索发布系统设计与实现

目前,国际上诸多天文项目均遵循虚拟天文台（Virtual Observatory,VO）标准协议开发各天文数据检索发布系统,对外公开发布数据,并对数据资源进行VO注册,从而使用户通过虚拟天文台门户网站即可访问获取不同天文项目的数据集.硬X射线调制望远镜（HXMT）卫星项目也将虚拟天文台技术引入HXMT卫星数据检索发布系统的设计与实现过程中,既满足HXMT卫星数据发布需求,又将HXMT卫星数据融入虚拟天文台环境,实现国际天文数据的共享共用.系统提出了符合虚拟天文台规范的体系架构,并选取SCS锥形检索、VOTable数据格式等虚拟天文台标准协议加以实现,采用MVC模式、SSH框架以及各种J2EE技术进行软件研发,提供检索访问、浏览下载和可视化功能.实践和应用结果表明,系统在解决天文数据资源互操作、共享发布、检索访问及异构应用集成方面均具有可操作性,对我国空间天文卫星数据检索发布系统的研制具有参考意义.     

INES: Astronomy Data Distribution for the Future

We describe here the structure under which the IUE Project will leave its archive at the completion of the distribution system and final data processing, within the INES system.The INES system is a total system, which comprises both the data in their final bulk processing mode for direct application to scientific analysis, as well as the software driving the distributed service for data retrieval directly by the end user.As a consequence of the expected long-term usage and support needs, it has been designed to require minimum maintenance costs and will not suffer single point failures because of the distributed nature. Integration of the INES system in a more general multi-wavelength archive for specialized analysis is anticipated tobe relatively easy, so further evolution of the data availabilitywill be driven fully by the users community and will evolve as thedata needs of the community develop. The long term responsibilitywill be transferred from ESA to the astronomical community throughthe establishment of the INES Principal Centre at the LAEFF Instituteof INTA in Spain.     

Visualization of Distributed Solar Data and Metadata with the Solar Weather Browser

The Solar Weather Browser (SWB) is a standalone, open-source software tool designed to display solar images with context overlays. It was originally developed for the space-weather forecast activities of the Solar Influence Data analysis Center (SIDC) but it is more generally well suited to display the output of solar-feature recognition methods. The SWB is also useful in the context of distributed solar-image archives, where it could play the role of a quick-look viewer. The SWB allows the user to visually browse large solar data sets and investigate the solar activity for a given date. It has a client – server design that minimizes the bandwidth from the network to the user’s monitor. The server processes the data using the SolarSoft library and distributes them through a Web server to which the SWB client connects. The client is readily available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows at . We discuss the software technology embedded in the SWB as well as its use for solar physics and space weather.     

Astronomical Data Archives and the Next Ground Based Telescopes

Next generation telescopes will be all digital instruments. This fact will allow the full integration of archives into telescopes operation. This is a main step if one wants to fulfill the requirement of usefulness of both scientific and technical data contained in the archives. A great change with respect to the past is required involving the modes of scheduling, observing, calibrating etc. New models of approaching the whole scientific data flow starting from the archiving problem are studied in several Institutions. These new models of observation, whose consequences in terms of human factor seem to be as important as the technological implications, promise to ensure a high and constant quality level of the data to be archived. The current status of this topic is reviewed. Some thoughts on the data model presently used in astronomy are also briefly given.     

Astronomical archives and their importance for knowledge transfer in Basic Space Science

We summarize the nature of modern astronomical archives with special reference to spectroscopic data archives and illustrate in which ways archives can play a role in the accelerated development of Basic Space Sciences in the developing countries. Some of the conflicting issues in the current planning of archives are addressed. Astronomical spectroscopic archives constitute a tool to progress towards an intellectual environment which is required to stimulate the sociological evolution which can support the peaceful and harmonious development of states. This is especially true under the conditions generated by the rapid evolution of technology in the industrialized countries.     

Mining the ESO WFI and INT WFC archives for known Near Earth Asteroids. Mega‐Precovery software

The ESO/MPG WFI and the INT WFC wide field archives comprising 330 000 images were mined to search for serendip‐itous encounters of known Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). A total of 152 as‐teroids (44 PHAs and 108 other NEAs) were identified using the PRECOVERY software, their astrometry being measured on 761 images and sent to the Minor Planet Centre. Both recoveries and precoveries were reported, including prolonged orbital arcs for 18 precovered objects and 10 recoveries. We analyze all new opposition data by comparing the orbits fitted before and after including our contributions. We conclude the paper presenting “Mega‐Precovery”, a new online service focused on data mining of many instrument archives simultaneously for one or a few given asteroids. A total of 28 instrument archives have been made available for mining using this tool, adding together about 2.5 million images forming the “Mega‐Archive”     

The eSTAR network – agent architectures for astronomy

The eSTAR Project uses intelligent agent technologies to carry out resource discovery, submit observation requests and analyze the reduced data returned from a meta‐network of robotic telescopes. Linking ground based telescopes with astronomical satellites, and using the emerging field of intelligent agent architectures to provide crucial autonomous decision making in software, the project has succeeded in combining data archives and research class telescopes, along with distributed computing nodes, to build an ad‐hoc peer‐to‐peer heterogeneous network of resources. We present the current operations paradigm of the eSTAR network and describe the direction in which the project intends to develop over the next few years. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

EURONEAR: Data mining of asteroids and Near Earth Asteroids

Besides new observations, mining old photographic plates and CCD image archives represents an opportunity to recover and secure newly discovered asteroids, also to improve the orbits of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) and Virtual Impactors (VIs). These are the main research aims of the EURONEAR network. As stated by the IAU, the vast collection of image archives stored worldwide is still insufficiently explored, and could be mined for known NEAs and other asteroids appearing occasionally in their fields. This data mining could be eased using a server to search and classify findings based on the asteroid class and the discovery date as “precoveries” or “recoveries”. We built PRECOVERY, a public facility which uses the Virtual Observatory SkyBoT webservice of IMCCE to search for all known Solar System objects in a given observation. To datamine an entire archive, PRECOVERY requires the observing log in a standard format and outputs a database listing the sorted encounters of NEAs, PHAs, numbered and un‐numbered asteroids classified as precoveries or recoveries based on the daily updated IAU MPC database. As a first application, we considered an archive including about 13 000 photographic plates exposed between 1930 and 2005 at the Astronomical Observatory in Bucharest, Romania. Firstly, we updated the database, homogenizing dates and pointings to a common format using the JD dating system and J2000 epoch. All the asteroids observed in planned mode were recovered, proving the accuracy of PRECOVERY. Despite the large field of the plates imaging mostly 2.27° × 2.27° fields, no NEA or PHA could be encountered occasionally in the archive due to the small aperture of the 0.38m refractor insufficiently to detect objects fainter than V ∼ 15. PRECOVERY can be applied to other archives, being intended as a public facility offered to the community by the EURONEAR project. This is the first of a series of papers aimed to improve orbits of PHAs and NEAs using precovered data derived from archives of images to be data mined in collaboration with students and amateurs. In the next paper we will search the CFHT Legacy Survey, while data mining of other archives is planned for the near future (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Sub-image data processing in Astro-WISE

Most often, astronomers are interested in a source (e.g., moving, variable, or extreme in some colour index) that lies on a few pixels of an image. However, the classical approach in astronomical data processing is the processing of the entire image or set of images even when the sole source of interest may exist on only a few pixels of one or a few images. This is because pipelines have been written and designed for instruments with fixed detector properties (e.g., image size, calibration frames, overscan regions, etc.). Furthermore, all metadata and processing parameters are based on an instrument or a detector. Accordingly, out of many thousands of images for a survey, this can lead to unnecessary processing of data that is both time-consuming and wasteful. We describe the architecture and an implementation of sub-image processing in Astro-WISE. The architecture enables a user to select, retrieve and process only the relevant pixels in an image where the source exists. We show that lineage data collected during the processing and analysis of datasets can be reused to perform selective reprocessing (at sub-image level) on datasets while the remainder of the dataset is untouched, a difficult process to automate without lineage.     

JPEG2000 Image Compression on Solar EUV Images

For future solar missions as well as ground-based telescopes, efficient ways to return and process data have become increasingly important. Solar Orbiter, which is the next ESA/NASA mission to explore the Sun and the heliosphere, is a deep-space mission, which implies a limited telemetry rate that makes efficient onboard data compression a necessity to achieve the mission science goals. Missions like the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and future ground-based telescopes such as the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, on the other hand, face the challenge of making petabyte-sized solar data archives accessible to the solar community. New image compression standards address these challenges by implementing efficient and flexible compression algorithms that can be tailored to user requirements. We analyse solar images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument onboard SDO to study the effect of lossy JPEG2000 (from the Joint Photographic Experts Group 2000) image compression at different bitrates. To assess the quality of compressed images, we use the mean structural similarity (MSSIM) index as well as the widely used peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) as metrics and compare the two in the context of solar EUV images. In addition, we perform tests to validate the scientific use of the lossily compressed images by analysing examples of an on-disc and off-limb coronal-loop oscillation time-series observed by AIA/SDO.     

OPserver: interactive online computations of opacities and radiative accelerations

Codes to compute mean opacities and radiative accelerations for arbitrary chemical mixtures using the Opacity Project recently revised data have been restructured in a client–server architecture and transcribed as a subroutine library. This implementation increases efficiency in stellar modelling where element stratification due to diffusion processes is depth dependent, and thus requires repeated fast opacity re-estimates. Three user modes are provided to fit different computing environments, namely, a web browser, a local workstation and a distributed grid.     

Time‐sensitive astronomy in non‐robotic telescopes

Protocols for dealing with time‐sensitive observations have traditionally focused on robotic telescope networks and other types of automated dedicated facilities, mostly in the optical domain. Using UKIRT and JCMT as examples, which are infrared and sub‐millimetre telescopes with a traditional PI‐dominated user base, we discuss how such facilities can join a heterogeneous telescope network to their mutual advantage. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Grid integration of robotic telescopes

Robotic telescopes and grid technology have made significant progress in recent years. Both innovations offer important advantages over conventional technologies, particularly in combination with one another. Here, we introduce robotic telescopes used by the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam as ideal instruments for building a robotic telescope network. We also discuss the grid architecture and protocols facilitating the network integration that is being developed by the German AstroGrid‐D project. Finally, we present three user interfaces employed for this purpose. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Interaction of free-floating planets with a star–planet pair

The recent discovery of free-floating planets and their theoretical interpretation as celestial bodies, either condensed independently or ejected from parent stars in tight clusters, introduced an intriguing possibility. Namely, that some exoplanets are not condensed from the protoplanetary disk of their parent star. In this novel scenario a free-floating planet interacts with an already existing planetary system, created in a tight cluster, and is captured as a new planet. In the present work we study this interaction process by integrating trajectories of planet-sized bodies, which encounter a binary system consisting of a Jupiter-sized planet revolving around a Sun-like star. To simplify the problem we assume coplanar orbits for the bound and the free-floating planet and an initially parabolic orbit for the free-floating planet. By calculating the uncertainty exponent, a quantity that measures the dependence of the final state of the system on small changes of the initial conditions, we show that the interaction process is a fractal classical scattering. The uncertainty exponent is in the range (0.2–0.3) and is a decreasing function of time. In this way we see that the statistical approach we follow to tackle the problem is justified. The possible final outcomes of this interaction are only four, namely flyby, planet exchange, capture or disruption. We give the probability of each outcome as a function of the incoming planet’s mass. We find that the probability of exchange or capture (in prograde as well as retrograde orbits and for very long times) is non-negligible, a fact that might explain the possible future observations of planetary systems with orbits that are either retrograde (see e.g. Queloz et?al. Astron. Astrophys. 417, L1, 2010) or tight and highly eccentric.     

Astro-WISE interfaces

From a simple text interface to a graphical user interfaces—Astro-WISE provides the user with a wide range of possibilities to interact with the information system according to the user’s tasks and use cases. We describe a general approach to the interfacing of a scientific information system. We use this approach to create a number of services, which allows the user to browse the data stored in the system, to process the data and to exchange the newly created images and catalogs with the users within the system and wider astronomical community. Reusability of interfaces and services is another important feature of our approach. It reduces the time and resources spent to interface other information systems created from Astro-WISE.     

基于Mark5B＋GPU脉冲星观测系统

云南天文台40m射电望远镜进行的脉冲星观测数据量巨大,必须实现数据的实时处理,否则将会产生海量的数据积压.为实现这一目标,采用图形处理器架构,对Mark5B数据进行解码、消色散、折叠等处理.实验结果表明,对以1s8MB的实时采样,可以在0.51s内处理完成,从而实现了实时处理的要求.首先介绍这一观测系统各部分的图形处理器实现,然后相对于传统中央处理器构架,对各部分的运算速度进行了详细的对比.针对时间开销最大的消色散部分,分析了单次傅里叶变换的数据量大小对执行效率的影响.从系统最终的输出轮廓和柱状图上可以看到实时处理的结果符合要求.最后对存在的问题和未来的工作进行了讨论.     

Consequences of tidal interaction between disks and orbiting protoplanets for the evolution of multi-planet systems with architecture resembling that of Kepler 444

We study orbital evolution of multi-planet systems with masses in the terrestrial planet regime induced through tidal interaction with a protoplanetary disk assuming that this is the dominant mechanism for producing orbital migration and circularization. We develop a simple analytic model for a system that maintains consecutive pairs in resonance while undergoing orbital circularization and migration. This model enables migration times for each planet to be estimated once planet masses, circularization times and the migration time for the innermost planet are specified. We applied it to a system with the current architecture of Kepler 444 adopting a simple protoplanetary disk model and planet masses that yield migration times inversely proportional to the planet mass, as expected if they result from torques due to tidal interaction with the protoplanetary disk. Furthermore the evolution time for the system as a whole is comparable to current protoplanetary disk lifetimes. In addition we have performed a number of numerical simulations with input data obtained from this model. These indicate that although the analytic model is inexact, relatively small corrections to the estimated migration rates yield systems for which period ratios vary by a minimal extent. Because of relatively large deviations from exact resonance in the observed system of up to 2 %, the migration times obtained in this way indicate only weak convergent migration such that a system for which the planets did not interact would contract by only \({\sim }1\,\%\) although undergoing significant inward migration as a whole. We have also performed additional simulations to investigate conditions under which the system could undergo significant convergent migration before reaching its final state. These indicate that migration times have to be significantly shorter and resonances between planet pairs significantly closer during such an evolutionary phase. Relative migration rates would then have to decrease allowing period ratios to increase to become more distant from resonances as the system approached its final state in the inner regions of the protoplanetary disk.     

Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Observational Data Weighting Method of Combined Orbit Determination of Near-earth Satellites of Bi-satellite Positioning System and its Applications

In the light of the problem of amalgamation and processing of multisource observational data in the combined orbit determination of near-earth satellites of the bi-satellite positioning system, the optimal weighting method of the improved variance component estimation of the two-step systematic error correction of homogeneous observational data is proposed. Analyses show that the multi-source amalgamation measurement model of the heterogeneous observational data essentially is a multi-structure, multi-parameter non-linear regression model, and the optimal weighting method of the combination of model structure characteristic analysis and variance component estimation of the heterogeneous observational data is established. The realization algorithms of the optimal weighting and the combined orbit determination parameter estimation of the two sorts of observational data are designed, and the simulation experiments of the combined orbit determination are carried out by taking the distances among the two satellites and the backup satellite and the homogeneous observational data and the distance between the two satellites and the heterogeneous observational data of satellite sensor angle measurements as the examples. The results of theoretical analysis and simulation calculation show that for the combined orbit determination of homogeneous observational data, the accuracy of orbit determination obtained by adopting the variance component estimation method of the two-step systematic error correction can be more superior than that obtained by means of the traditional empirical weighting method. For the combined orbit determination of heterogeneous observational data, through the introduction of the weighting factor by which the model structure is characterized the accuracies of the combined orbit determination of the near-earth satellite and geostationary satellite are both improved to a certain extent in comparison with the mean weighting mode.