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Basement
Once Upon a Time in the Basement....
Laura A. Whitlock
HEASARC
The large room in the basement of Building 2 at Goddard Space Flight Center had
been used for the storage of 9 track data tape reels from Code 660 (Laboratory
for High Energy Astrophysics) and Code 690 (Laboratory for Extraterrestrial
Physics) missions for many years. Then it was scheduled to become the XTE Guest
Observer Facility, so the tapes had to go. Unfortunately, there was no
equally-sized area for them to go to and so it was decided that the data would
be transferred to a smaller storage media (such as 8mm and 4mm cassettes). By
doing this, three goals would be accomplished: 1) a copy of the data would be
available for our immediate access and analysis; 2) a copy of the data bases
would be at hand to structure and reformat for transfer to a permanent CDROM
archive; and 3) the ~2500 tapes belonging to Code 660/HEASARC would be
transferred to a total tape volume that would fit in a file cabinet.
Based on a program to transfer an exact image copy from tape to tape (acquired
from SST-10 at Los Alamos National Laboratory), a procedure was developed to
perform a verified transfer of the data from 9 track reel to 8mm(4mm), followed
by a second copy to 4mm (8mm). The copying has been done on the LHEAVX cluster
and is now ~95% complete, with ~40 Gigabytes of data having been successfully
copied. The 'rescued' data sets and a brief description about what each
contains is given below.
After the copying is completed, the data sets can be transferred to CDROM,
along with copies of the software which uses the data set and any related
documentation. (I am still in need of bitmaps, dataset descriptions, etc. of
the OSO 8 RATE, PHA, and ORBIT data bases. If anyone out there can provide me
with any information, I would be grateful.) This transformation will make the
data much more reliable as an archive. A reformatting of the databases into
FITS also will be done for the 'useful' data sets, as prioritized by the HUG
and user community. These FITS databases then will be put on-line at the
HEASARC. In part, this article is a request for input from the user community
about the scientific value of each data set. If the reader has particularly
strong feelings about wanting a given data set to be put higher or lower in the
queue for FITSifying, please send your comments to
whitlock@lheavx.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Acknowledgments
Mr. Donald Salazar of Los Alamos National Laboratory must be acknowledged for
his invaluable help in getting the copying program up and running on the LHEAVX
system and the expertise he provided when questions arose.
Hard time in the "tape copying chair" was put in by Ms. Pat Tyler, Ms. Karen
Smale, Mr. Orin Day, and Ms. Gail Rohrbach. It was all much appreciated. Kudos
should also go to the system managers for dealing with the many hardware
problems that arose during this long, hard effort; namely, Mr. Michael Wilson,
Mr. Phil Newman, and Mr. Ted Ying.
Also, a special thank-you goes to Dr. Jean Swank for her patience in answering
my many questions about the science-loss implications of each data set. Her
endless supply of detailed knowledge was invaluable to this effort.
Additionally, I would like to thank Drs. Jean Swank and Frank Marshall for
providing me with extensive documentation on the various HEAO 1 A-2 data sets,
and Drs. Steve Holt and Louis Kaluzienski for information concerning the Ariel
5 data.
The "rescued" data sets and a brief description about what each contains is
given in
Figure 1.
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Last modified: Monday, 19-Jun-2006 11:40:52 EDT
HEASARC Staff Scientist Position - Applications are now being accepted for a Staff Scientist with significant experience and interest in the technical aspects of astrophysics research, to work in the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD. Refer to the AAS Job register for full details.
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