Previous
abstract 
Next
abstract
Session 57 - Instrumentation & Information Science.
Oral session, Thursday, January 08
Jefferson,
IMPReSS is one of several new services provided by the Astrophysics Data Facility (ADF) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It is a graphical interface to astrophysics databases that presents the user with plane of the sky outlines or silhouettes of images obtained by space-based telescopes. Its purpose is to provide a visualisation environment that finds and displays, in detail, mission footprints that lie within a user selected region of the sky. Searches can also be restricted by a range in time of the observations. It is also intended to aid astronomers in retrieving publicly available data by sending requests to data archive sites for detailed information, browse images, and data files of graphically selected observations. The time to search through the logs of many missions is kept to a minimum by holding the essential information in memory in an IDL session continually running in server mode. The primary archive sites for which IMPReSS holds metadata are: the National Space Sciences Data Center (NSSDC), the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). links to and from other browsers are being created. For instance, a link exists from the ADC catalog viewer (discussed at this meeting) allows one to quickly find an entry in a catalog or journal table and immediately find which NASA missions have made observations of the entry object.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: shaya@tarantella.gsfc.nasa.gov
