The European HST science data archive

The design of the Data Management Facility (DMF), the system to handle the data from HST, has been based on the concepts of modularity and flexibility, so that changes inevitably due to occur during the long lifetime of the project could be gracefully accomodated. At the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF), new constraints have led the archive group to evolve the system, so to allow a more efficient ingesting of the data imported from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), an easier browsing of the HST catalogue of observations, and a more efficient servicing of archive researchers' retrieval requests. In this paper, the European Science Data Archive of HST data is described, with particular reference to dataflow, hardware and software system structure, operations, differences with DMF, and foreseen developments.Affiliated with the Astrophysics Division, Space Science Dept., ESAThe observations of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555.