Release of the ISO Legacy Archive (IDA v5.0) on 28/02/2002

News of the day

In the afternoon of the 28th of February, the ISO Legacy Archive was released (ISO Data Archive v5.0).

It represents the output of the calibration work through all the ISO Post Operations Phase to produce the best automatically calibrated data products for the ISO mission. This release pertains to the data products in the archive: Tuning of the support and explanatory documentation will continue for some more months, and support documentation will undergo occasional upgrades in the coming years of ISO's Active Archive Phase.

A bit of history

The ISO Interim Archive was released on 09/12/1998 when all of the ISO telemetry had been processed with the version of the Offline Processing Software and Calibration files available at the end of the ISO operations, i.e. OLP 7.0.1 and CALG 4.0. This produced a complete and uniformly processed set of ISO data products that was saved on CDROM jukeboxes.

Later on, when new version of the Offline Processing Software and Calibration files became available, and on-the-fly processing facility was provided in the ISO Data Archive to allow users to get the most up-to-date ISO products.

On 16/05/2001, the ISO New Interim Archive was released when all ISO telemetry had been reprocessed with OLP 9.1 and CALG 6.0 to produce a complete and uniform set of ISO products. This time, as technology had evolved, all the products were stored directly on magnetic disks which allow faster access.

The ISO Legacy Archive

In recent months, we have undertaken reprocessing all ISO telemetry with OLP 10.0 for CAM, LWS and PHT and OLP 10.1 for SWS and for LWS observations made prior to revolution 237, to produce the ISO Legacy Archive, a new complete and uniform set of ISO products still held on magnetic disks.

All icons, postcards and survey products available from the ISO Data Archive applet have also been reprocessed.

Now the on-the-fly reprocessing option has been removed from the IDA interface having become irrelevant. At the same time, the option to receive the products on CDROM has also been removed as all the retrieval requests are now made by FTP.

Looking to the future...

Through the Active Archive Phase, although there will not be any more updates of the automatically produced core ISO data products, the IDA will still be improved through the mechanism of ingesting User Reduced Data into the archive.

Furthermore, there will still be regular updates of the ISO Data Archive interface.


The ISO Data Archive can be accessed at http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/iso/access-the-archive

Christophe Arviset, ISO Data Centre, 28/02/2002