Chandra Announcement: Replacement of “bad” target names in the Chandra Data Archive
Guardado, Karla
Announcing the replacement of “bad” target names in the Chandra Data Archive
In order to make it easier to discover public Chandra observations and maximize the total scientific return of the mission, public archival observations need to be easily found across public interfaces using both coordinates-based and name-based searches. The Chandra Archive Operation team, over the years, has identified a large number of public, archival observations whose target names are either uninformative (i.e. do not contain information about the identity of the target), insufficiently informative (contain only partial information that does not permit a univocal identification), or including typos and errors.
On 9/15/20, 5181 distinct “bad” target names of Chandra observations taken through 1/1/2017 have been replaced across all public Chandra interfaces (ChaSeR, the Footprint Service and all Virtual Observatory interfaces) with new, manually picked target names that follow widely accepted naming conventions developed by the International Astronomical Union, can be associated with unique sky coordinates using “name resolvers" services and are widely recognizable. The other identifiers (Observation ID - ObsID) and target coordinates have remained unchanged.
The new target names will progressively replace the old “bad” target names also in the headers of the data products associated with the observations during the upcoming fifth major reprocessing of the full Chandra archive.
Additional details on the criteria used to select the bad target names and their replacements, and a link to the full list of observations with replaced target names can be found here. If you have any question or comments, please contact the Chandra Data Archive team at arc...@cfa.harvard.edu .
Karla Guardado IT Specialist Chandra Director's Office Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian Office: (617) 495 2638 60 Garden Street | MS 67 | Cambridge, MA 02138 |
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