About NAVO
The NASA Astronomical Virtual Observatories (NAVO) program coordinates the efforts of NASA astronomy archives in providing comprehensive and consistent access to NASA's astronomical data through standardized interfaces. NAVO comprises
- the Mikulski Archive at Space Telescope (MAST)
- the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC),
- the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), and
- the NASA Extragalactic Database (NED).
These centers work in collaboration with the other NASA archives and the US astronomy community to ensure that users can easily find and retrieve NASA data. These pages describe the interfaces that have been built, how users can get to these data, how they have been used, and other aspects of the NAVO collaboration.
Our NAVO Tools page describes how to use NAVO from two perspectives. Scientists who simply want access to data regardless of the archive it is located at may wish to use existing VO-capable tools query and retrieve data. These include interfaces at NAVO archives (MAST's Portal Service or the HEASARC' Xamin) and community capabilities like TOPCAT and Aladin applications. These pages can also help those who plan to build their own interfaces to the data publishing services of the NAVO archives.
The NAVO community page describes efforts of the NAVO team to work with astronomical community generally, including representation on the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), the US Virtual Observatory Alliance, other NASA archives and the any other interested parties.
NAVO also maintains the elements of the virtual observatory infrastructure that were built by the US community over the past decades. This includes a registry of VO services worldwide that can be used by software and scientists to look for VO services and a framework for monitoring and validating operational VO services.
The formal standards that have been developed as part of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) were specifically designed to provide standard machine APIs to astronomical data and have been adopted as the core of the NAVO efforts. Since there are many such standards usually with many options, NAVO works to ensure that we adopt the standards with the highest benefit for doing science while maintaining consistency across the NAVO archives.
While we have attempted to minimize the use of VO jargon on these pages, a glossary of the key standards is included which provides a succinct description of what the standard is and the role it plays within NAVO.
A complete and detailed specification of all implemented interfaces is given by mission/data set our summary of implemented capabilities In addition to providing a detailed breakdown of interfaces for more than 100 missions/datasets, this includes a summary and links to all the archive specific information we provide on NAVO interfaces.
One area that NAVO is researching is how we can most effectively use such major datasets as the GSC 2, Galex, WISE and 2MASS catalogs all held at NAVO archives. How do we effectively index these especially when we wish to correlate multiple large tables. The state of this effort is described in our indexing study.