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What is IRSA?

IRSA is chartered to curate the calibrated science products from NASAs infrared and sub-millimeter missions, including five major large-area/all-sky surveys. IRSA data sets are cited in about 10% of astronomical refereed papers.

IRSA offers access to digital archives through powerful query engines, including VO-compliant interfaces, and offers unique tools such as the IRAS scan processing tool Scanpi. IRSA exploits a re-useable architecture to deploy cost-effective archives for customers, including: the Spitzer Space Telescope; the 2MASS and IRAS all-sky surveys; and multi-mission datasets such as COSMOS. In the near future, IRSA will serve public data from the WISE all-sky survey and the Planck mission.

IRSA also offers value-added data sets, for which we are not the primary curator, but for which there is an additional value, such as having the ability to retrieve other IRSA data, and having it in the same, standard format. These data sets include USNO-B, DENIS and SDSS, among others.

IRSA is part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)

For more information, see the Mission Summary page. More detailed information on specific holdings is available are available on IRSA's holdings index (divided by data type): catalogs, images, and spectra.

All data are accessible from the menu on the left side of the page. The menu is divided into several sections:

Catalog Search

Image Services

  • FinderChart is a visualization tool to cross-compare 2MASS, DSS and SDSS image data sets. It displays a finder chart showing the same region of the sky at various wavelengths and epochs, and supports user interaction with the images.
  • 2MASS Image Services support access to the 2MASS Atlas (Full Resolution) and Quicklook images.
  • 2MASS Extended Sources Image Server returns composite "postage stamp" images of extended sources, and basic extended source catalog information.
  • Cutouts returns small "cutouts" of a user-specified size of image data sets archived at IRSA. Returns FITS and JPEG formats.

Inventories

  • The Data Discovery (RADAR) is an inventory and data exploration service that generates an inventory of IRSA's science data products and supports one-click retrieval of data.
  • The Spitzer Heritage Archive (SHA) is the archive for all Spitzer data, from both the cryogenic and warm missions.
  • The NVO Catalogs service (Sky Statistics) generates source counts, coverage maps, and links to downloadable data for catalog holdings at IRSA, NED, and VizieR.

Tools

  • OASIS Visualizer supports visualization of and interaction with data from astronomical archives, including IRSA, NED, CDS, STScI, LLNL, NRAO, AAVSO, HEASARC, and JPL.
  • Montage is a toolkit for assembling FITS images into custom mosaics.
  • Coordinate and Object Lookup uses NED and SIMBAD to retrieve coordinates for astronomical objects by name, and supports coordinate transformations.
  • The Dust Extinction service uses the maps of Schlegel et al. to return the 100 µm intensity integrated along a line of sight through the Galaxy, and corresponding estimates of the Galactic dust extinction and dust temperatures. The service also returns maps of the reddening and elementary region statistics.
  • Quality Assurance Tools are available for IRSA data providers.
  • IRSA's Data Tag retrieval service returns data encoded in a published data tag, which link science publications with archives.

Data Sets

If you are interested in data from a particular mission, browse through the available Data Sets. Mousing over a dataset will bring up menus with links to mission-specific services and documentation.

IRSA Acknowledgement

If you use IRSA in your research, please include the following acknowledgement in your paper:

"This research has made use of the NASA/ IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration."

Please include also in your paper acknowledgements requested by individual missions and data providers.