Previous
abstract 
Next
abstract
Session 38 - ADS and Expert Assistants.
Display session, Tuesday, June 09
Atlas Ballroom,
OPUS (OSS-PODPS Unified System) at STScI manages the HST data processing pipeline which formats the data into usable products and calibrates the science data. Data quality assessment is performed for all science data and stored in keywords written to the Procedural Data Quality (PDQ) files. The PDQ keyword QUALITY and QUALCOM lines are displayed through STARVIEW. The majority of observations (>85%) are now automatically assessed for procedural data quality without human intervention. OPUS Astronomers assess the quality of all target acquisitions, onboard and interactive, and investigate observations that have been flagged due to anomalies such as guide star failures, shortened exposures, etc. If a problem occurs that may have degraded the utility of an observation, OPUS Astronomers report the nature of the problem via an HST Observation Exception report to the PI and STScI staff for further investigation. Examples of OPUS products will presented.
Maintaining the level of quality assurance for such a large and growing flood of data represents a unique challenge. The new OPUS pipeline includes many processing steps which are distributed across several workstations. It has been designed to diminish bottlenecks and to increase the processing flexibility for new instrument data. The pipeline processing load has increased 10 fold since launch (April 1990) while OPUS has maintained a 48 hour or less (3 sigma) delivery to the HST Archive. The majority of the data has completed pipeline processing within 2 to 3 hours upon receipt in OPUS. A brief description of managing the pipeline will be discussed, highlighting the instruments currently onboard HST.
