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Project Charter

Long Description

This project deals with the ingest of FITS data cubes, catalogs, and spectra, and providing access to the products from the archive.  For details of the ALFALFA project see the project web page.

The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey is a completed, blind extragalactic HI survey exploiting Arecibo's superior sensitivity, angular resolution and digital technology to conduct a census of the local HI universe over a cosmologically significant volume. ALFALFA has detected more than 30,000 extragalactic HI line sources out to z~0.06, and its catalog will be especially useful in synergy with wide area surveys conducted at other wavelengths.  The data collection is of great
interest to the radio community and NRAO users.

ALFALFA has produced over 7400 dual polarization data cubes, an ASCII catalog of the > 30,000 extragalactic detections, and HI line spectra.

ALFALFA is a completed program.  All data products were processed through IDL.   The ALFALFA project will provide the data cubes in FITS format.

From the SRDP perspective, the set of all ALFALFA data products is a collection.

ALFALFA Data Products

Spectral Data Cubes, Spectral Weights, Continuum Maps, Continuum Weights

Data cube option 1 (Everything in one file - a primary header and three image headers)

Data option 2 (Spectral cube and three ancillary products - spectral weights, continuum maps, and continuum weights)

Dimensions of data

Number of files

Volume of data

Stakeholders

Brian Kent, NRAO, Project Sponsor and Technical Expert

Jeff Kern, NRAO, Project Sponsor

Martha Haynes, Cornell, Technical Expert

Requirements

Must haves:

Implementation Plan

Risk Assessment

The ALFALFA data represent a low-risk, mature dataset that will be useful to the astronomical community.  The data are not going to be remade or regridded, and will be ingested into the archive one time.