{"dataset":{"slug":"science-data-archives","title":"Science Data Archives & Standards","description":"The archives that hold astronomy's data — MAST, the ESA archives, IRSA, HEASARC, NED, CDS with SIMBAD and VizieR — and the data standards astronomy is built on: FITS, VOTable, and ASDF.","version":"1.0.0","lastGenerated":"2026-06-29","license":"CC BY-SA 4.0","entityCount":13,"sources":["nasa","esa","eso"]},"entities":[{"id":"data_archive:alma-archive","name":"ALMA Science Archive","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"The archive of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the great international millimetre-wave observatory, preserving its observations of cold gas, dust, and the discs where planets form.","entryPath":"/data-archives/alma-archive"},{"id":"data_standard:asdf","name":"ASDF","type":"data_standard","domain":"science","description":"A modern, human-readable data format developed by the astronomy community as a successor to FITS for complex data — used by the James Webb Space Telescope for its calibration and world-coordinate metadata and adopted as the primary data format of the Roman mission.","entryPath":"/data-archives/asdf"},{"id":"data_archive:cds","name":"CDS","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"The Strasbourg astronomical Data Centre, a cornerstone of open astronomy that operates the SIMBAD and VizieR services and helped build the Virtual Observatory, tying the world's catalogues and object databases together.","entryPath":"/data-archives/cds"},{"id":"data_archive:esa-science-archives","name":"ESA Science Archives","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"ESA's science-data archives, hosted at the European Space Astronomy Centre, holding the observations of Europe's astronomy and planetary missions — from Gaia and XMM-Newton to Mars Express and Euclid.","entryPath":"/data-archives/esa-science-archives"},{"id":"data_archive:eso-archive","name":"ESO Science Archive","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"The archive of the European Southern Observatory, holding the data of its ground-based telescopes in Chile — the Very Large Telescope and its partners — for reuse by astronomers worldwide.","entryPath":"/data-archives/eso-archive"},{"id":"data_standard:fits","name":"FITS","type":"data_standard","domain":"science","description":"The universal file format of astronomy — a self-describing container for images, tables, and spectra with a human-readable header of metadata. In use since the 1980s and still the standard way astronomical data is stored and shared.","entryPath":"/data-archives/fits"},{"id":"data_archive:heasarc","name":"HEASARC","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"NASA's archive for high-energy astrophysics — the X-ray and gamma-ray data of missions like Chandra, Swift, and Fermi — a central resource for the study of the most energetic objects in the universe.","entryPath":"/data-archives/heasarc"},{"id":"data_archive:irsa","name":"IRSA","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"NASA's archive for infrared and submillimetre astronomy — the data of Spitzer, WISE, 2MASS, and Herschel among others — operated by IPAC at Caltech.","entryPath":"/data-archives/irsa"},{"id":"data_archive:mast","name":"MAST","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"NASA's archive for the data of its optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared space telescopes — Hubble, JWST, TESS, Kepler, and more — operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute. One of the most-used archives in astronomy.","entryPath":"/data-archives/mast"},{"id":"data_archive:ned","name":"NED","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"A database that gathers everything known about objects beyond the Milky Way — positions, redshifts, images, and the literature — cross-linking millions of galaxies and quasars across all the surveys that have observed them.","entryPath":"/data-archives/ned"},{"id":"data_archive:simbad","name":"SIMBAD","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"A database of astronomical objects beyond the Solar System, collecting the names, identifiers, measurements, and references for millions of stars and galaxies so that any object can be looked up and cross-identified across the literature.","entryPath":"/data-archives/simbad"},{"id":"data_archive:vizier","name":"VizieR","type":"data_archive","domain":"science","description":"The most complete library of published astronomical catalogues, letting anyone query tens of thousands of catalogues and data tables in a uniform way — the reference source for catalogue data.","entryPath":"/data-archives/vizier"},{"id":"data_standard:votable","name":"VOTable","type":"data_standard","domain":"science","description":"The Virtual Observatory's XML standard for exchanging tabular data — catalogues and query results — between archives, tools, and services, so tables flow between systems without custom parsing.","entryPath":"/data-archives/votable"}]}