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Session 15 - Interstellar Medium I.
Display session, Monday, January 15
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
In 1993 a Copernicus archive project began in the Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics at GSFC, supported by the NASA Astrophysics Data Program, to create an electronic archive of raw and processed ultraviolet spectra from the Copernicus mission and make them available through the World Wide Web. The third Orbiting Astronomical Observatory ( Copernicus) was launched in 1972 carrying a Princeton University UV spectrograph which obtained high (\sim0.05Åand low (\sim0.2Åresolution spectra in the wavelength region \sim900 - 3200ÅCopernicus observed 553 targets (primarily bright stars) between 1972 and 1981, generating 687,718 spectral scans. 254 MB of data were archived by Princeton at NSSDC on 9-track tapes in a mission-unique format.
As part of this ADP program, we have recovered the Copernicus raw spectral scans and reformatted them as disk files using FITS format. Each file contains all observations for a given target, with data pertaining to each spectral scan stored as a row in a Binary Table extension. These files are available through the Copernicus archive WWW site. The Princeton data processing pipeline has been recreated at GSFC and is undergoing tests. ``Stacked'' (co-added) high-resolution U1 scans (\sim930 - 1450Åproduced by this software will be available in the near future. A capability is also planned to enable interested astronomers to stack scans themselves (highly recommended) via remote X-window sessions.
The URL for the Copernicus archive World Wide Web site is \tt http://iuewww.gsfc.nasa.gov/copernicus/oao3.html.
