Podcast: Astronomical Data’s Long Road Home

• By Sara Mitchell
• June 30, 2009
• Comments Off on Podcast: Astronomical Data’s Long Road Home

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It’s easy to think of a satellite as a fancy digital camera – just point, shoot, and look at the pretty picture that emerges.  But it’s not that simple.  Astronomical data has a far longer journey to make it from the satellite to end users.  Bounced between satellites, sent to Earth, processed, networked, and archived… each observation has to pass through several steps before it can be analyzed by scientists.  And that’s not even considering the further effort required to make a pretty picture!

This episode follows data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on its odyssey from space to Earth, interviewing key personnel along the way.  

From Fermi to Goddard:

In this episode, we tracked data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope along its route from the satellite to end users.  It’s a relatively quick process, but it has a surprising number of steps to get the data to Earth and distributed to all of the sites that handle it.  Here are some resources about the data’s journey:

• Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope – The official NASA website for the mission, and the source of the data discussed in this episode.
• Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) – An array of nine geosynchronous satellites responsible for receiving and relaying information from other spacecraft. Data from Fermi is passed through TDRSS to a ground station in White Sands, New Mexico.
• LAT Instrument Science Operations Center – Data from the Large Area Telescope (LAT) is sent to the LISOC at Stanford University for processing.
• GBM Instrument Operations Center – Data from the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM) is sent to the GIOC in Huntsville, Alabama, where it is processed and alerts can be issues for gamma-ray bursts.
• Fermi Science Support Center – Your one-stop shop for Fermi data and analysis tools. The FSSC archives the data and makes it available to scientists.