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MAST Databases PDF Print E-mail
Written by bill.smith   
Thursday, 28 January 2010 12:35

See - NStED 

The Multimission Archive at Space Telescope Science Institute (MAST) is a NASA funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, with the primary focus on scientifically related data sets in the optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.

A World Wide Telescope user, positioned over a star inside the Kepler Field Of View simply right clicks (to get the menu options) and selects "VO Cone Search". He then enters Kepler as a search, and  list of 4 available datasets is displayed.

VO Cone Search Datasets

If you are using the "WWT Client" you will be able to Click on the first row (Kepler Input Catalog) to see stars in the KIC.  This is instant and very effective. The full database is over 13M stars (4.5M inside the Kepler FOV)  but just a cone of 2,000 are download on each search.   The Kepler Mission has also made available for us :

  • Kepler Exoplanet HLSP : a dataset of the announced Exoplanets
  • Kepler Target Search : the 150,000 target stars 
  • Kepler Data Search : a dataset of "released" stars - where NASA no longer is focussed on these stars and is allowing the public to see their discarded light curves.

As at June 2010, the most important NEW dataset is the "Released Kepler Planetary Candidates" (312 potential exoplanets). This is not yet available as a "VO Cone Search" but will be very soon.  

For students wanting to explore the use of the NASA/MAST tools, datasets can also be downloaded from outside the WWT using MAST tools.




Last Updated on Thursday, 12 August 2010 11:23