Science Archive

The Archive system is involved at many stages in the Data Flow system. For the sake of clarity it is important to distinguish between:

• the Science Archive which is a subsystem of the Data Flow available to archive researchers and astronomers for catalog access and retrieval of scientific data as they become available after the end of the proprietary period, as well as retrieval of calibration, instrument data and logs as soon as they have been processed and verified by the Data Flow Operations.
• the Database Services layer of the Data Flow system which provide the storage facility necessary for the intermediate and process data needed for the operations of all Data Flow facilities.

The Science Archive is a service that will be provided and maintained from the central archive in Garching. The Paranal archive will store the observation acquired during the latest 6 months. The Garching archive will contain the complete history of observations.