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The Parkes Observatory Pulsar Data Archive

Lawrence Toomey, George Hobbs, James Dempsey, Shane Majewski, Shi Dai, John Reynolds

TL;DR

The Parkes Observatory Pulsar Data Archive article documents the ongoing preservation and dissemination of Murriyang Parkes pulsar observations through CSIRO's Data Access Portal (DAP). It details data types, provenance via DOIs and PSRFITS headers, embargo policies, and the organization of data into standard and other collections, with emphasis on reusability and reproducibility. The paper introduces PFITS, a modern C-based toolkit for PSRFITS data, and discusses cloud-enabled processing and data-recovery challenges as data volumes grow. It highlights the archive's role in enabling re-analysis and new discoveries while outlining future infrastructure needs to handle escalating data scales and global access.

Abstract

Data from observations of pulsars made by Murriyang, the CSIRO Parkes 64-metre radio-telescope over the last three decades are more accessible than ever before, largely due to their storage in expansive long-term archives. Containing nearly 2 million files from more than 400 Parkes pulsar projects, CSIRO's Data Access Portal is leading the global effort in making pulsar data accessible. In this article, we present the current status of the archive, and provide information about the acquisition, analysis, reduction, visualisation, preservation and dissemination of these data sets. We highlight the importance of such an archive, and present a selection of new results emanating from archival data.

The Parkes Observatory Pulsar Data Archive

TL;DR

The Parkes Observatory Pulsar Data Archive article documents the ongoing preservation and dissemination of Murriyang Parkes pulsar observations through CSIRO's Data Access Portal (DAP). It details data types, provenance via DOIs and PSRFITS headers, embargo policies, and the organization of data into standard and other collections, with emphasis on reusability and reproducibility. The paper introduces PFITS, a modern C-based toolkit for PSRFITS data, and discusses cloud-enabled processing and data-recovery challenges as data volumes grow. It highlights the archive's role in enabling re-analysis and new discoveries while outlining future infrastructure needs to handle escalating data scales and global access.

Abstract

Data from observations of pulsars made by Murriyang, the CSIRO Parkes 64-metre radio-telescope over the last three decades are more accessible than ever before, largely due to their storage in expansive long-term archives. Containing nearly 2 million files from more than 400 Parkes pulsar projects, CSIRO's Data Access Portal is leading the global effort in making pulsar data accessible. In this article, we present the current status of the archive, and provide information about the acquisition, analysis, reduction, visualisation, preservation and dissemination of these data sets. We highlight the importance of such an archive, and present a selection of new results emanating from archival data.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 24 sections, 3 figures, 7 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Data Acquisition
  3. Archival data products
  4. Data Preservation
  5. Accepted file formats
  6. Data provenance
  7. DAP collection types
  8. 'Standard' pulsar collections
  9. 'Other' pulsar-related collections
  10. Embargo overview
  11. Scope of available collections
  12. Scope of available receiver and data acquisition instrumentation
  13. Scope of sky coverage
  14. Collections containing historically important discoveries
  15. Additions to the archive
  16. ...and 9 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Murriyang pulsar data published in CSIRO's Data Access Portal, by observing semester.
  • Figure 2: A TOPCAT Hammer-Aitoff sky projection in Galactic coordinates of observations published in the DAP from the main pulsar surveys conducted with Murriyang over the last 30 years.
  • Figure 3: The output of pfits_frb: the profile of the Lorimer Burst is shown in the top plot, de-dispersed in the centre and dispersed at the bottom. The profile shows significant clipping in this beam (the discovery beam) of the Multibeam receiver because the pulse saturated the available dynamic range.