Spitzer Heritage Archive v1.5 Announcement

Last Updated: 24 August 2010


We are proud to announce the availability of version 1.5 of the Spitzer Heritage Archive (SHA), which is resident at the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC). This is the first versoin of SHA beyond the beta version. Note that the SHA will replace Leopard in November 2010! The SHA provides, among other things, a much more efficient data packaging process than Leopard did, plus the ability to only retrieve the portion of an AOR relevant to your search. Please try it out now and let us know what you think (and help us find bugs).

The new features in this version (compared to the prior version) are:

  1. Now all cryo and warm data will be available via the SHA by 1 September 2010. All the data currently available in the prior version of the SHA are also available in this version.
  2. Accounts and Security - proprietary data are now also available through the SHA. This has several implications:
    1. If you are not logged in, and doing a search, observations that were taken but are not yet public are listed in red. The data owner must log in to download them.
    2. If you have proprietary data (now or in the future) you will need an account. If you already received an e-mail from the Spitzer Science Center (SSC), they have created an account for you, and you can log in and access your data immediately.
    3. If you did not receive an e-mail from the SSC with your account information, and you have or will have proprietary data, you need to create an account. It is not hard. Click on "create account" and follow the instructions. Usernames need to be unique, so if someone else already has the username you want, you will need to pick another. Since we don't know what username you want (or indeed, if it is really you), please email the SSC helpdesk to tell us which account(s) you have set up, and which PIDs to tie to your new account. (This is similar to the procedure you'd need to use now to, e.g., give your new postdoc access to your program.)
    4. Ultimately, this account will be used to customize your experience at all IRSA sites. For example, you can save searches, tag data, etc., now within the SHA, but ultimately, these features will be available for all IRSA holdings.
  3. Search - added features include:
    1. improved NAIF ID resolution
    2. ability to search by instrument data-taking mode, and
    3. improved display layout
  4. Data - new quality assessment (QA) summary comments available in Details preview
  5. Visualization - added features include:
    1. IRS slit separation
    2. Depth of Coverage maps
    3. 3-color plots
    4. Faster grid overlays
    5. FITS header display improvements
    6. Catalog search column selection and definition
    7. Spectrum plot zoom

Known bugs and other idiosyncrasies are available here. The most important of these is the following:

When preparing to download data, you may choose Raw, Calibration, Level 1, Level 1+ancillary, Level 2, or Level 2+ancillary. Some data that you might expect to get when selecting Level 1 or Level 2 (not ancillary) do not arrive as part of the download. However, all(*) of the data are in fact in the archive, they're just not yet packaged in the final configuration we want. To be sure that you do, in fact, get all of the data associated with your observations, select "ancillary" and all of the data will be packaged with your download.

(*) some specific files for some modes of MIPS are not currently accessible via the SHA even with this workaround, but we are actively working to fix this. See the complete bugs list for more detail.