Engineering topics

Seaman, Rob

Publications and source records attributed to Seaman, Rob.

2 records

NASA NTRS2011

Sky Event Reporting Metadata (VOEvent) Version 2.0

VOEvent [20] defines the content and meaning of a standard information packet for representing, transmitting, publishing and archiving information about a transient celestial event, with the implication that timely follow-up is of interest. The objective is to motivate the observation of targets-of-opportunity, to drive robotic telescopes, to trigger archive searches, and to alert the community. VOEvent is focused on the reporting of photon events, but events mediated by disparate phenomena such as neutrinos, gravitational waves, and solar or atmospheric particle bursts may also be reported. Structured data is used, rather than natural language, so that automated systems can effectively interpret VOEvent packets. Each packet may contain zero or more of the "who, what, where, when & how" of a detected event, but in addition, may contain a hypothesis (a "why") regarding the nature of the underlying physical cause of the event.

Seaman, Rob↗

NASA NTRS2010

A New Compression Method for FITS Tables

As the size and number of FITS binary tables generated by astronomical observatories increases, so does the need for a more efficient compression method to reduce the amount disk space and network bandwidth required to archive and down1oad the data tables. We have developed a new compression method for FITS binary tables that is modeled after the FITS tiled-image compression compression convention that has been in use for the past decade. Tests of this new method on a sample of FITS binary tables from a variety of current missions show that on average this new compression technique saves about 50% more disk space than when simply compressing the whole FITS file with gzip. Other advantages of this method are (1) the compressed FITS table is itself a valid FITS table, (2) the FITS headers remain uncompressed, thus allowing rapid read and write access to the keyword values, and (3) in the common case where the FITS file contains multiple tables, each table is compressed separately and may be accessed without having to uncompress the whole file.

Pence, William↗