Related papers: Digital Infrastructure in Astrophysics
Africa has amazing potential due to natural (such as dark sky) and human resources for scientific research in astronomy and space science. At the same time, the continent is still facing many difficulties, and its countries are now…
The recent explosion of recorded digital data and its processed derivatives threatens to overwhelm researchers when analysing their experimental data or when looking up data items in archives and file systems. While current hardware…
Utilisation of the material and energy resources of the Solar System will be essential for the development of a sustainable space economy and associated infrastructure. Science will be a major beneficiary of a space economy, even if its…
The increase of astronomical data produced by a new generation of observational tools poses the need to distribute data and to bring computation close to the data. Trying to answer this need, we set up a federated data and computing…
Maximizing the public impact of astronomy projects in the next decade requires NSF-funded centers to support the development of online, mobile-friendly outreach and education activities. EPO teams with astronomy, education, and web…
While almost everything that astronomers study occurs in the vacuum of space, astronomy itself does not `happen in a vacuum'. Interactions between scientists, as well as outreach to members of the public, improve extensively from access to…
Eight years after the ADS first appeared the last decadal survey wrote: "NASA's initiative for the Astrophysics Data System has vastly increased the accessibility of the scientific literature for astronomers. NASA deserves credit for this…
Many astronomy data centres still work on filesystems. Industry has moved on; current practice in computing infrastructure is to achieve Big Data scalability using object stores rather than POSIX file systems. This presents us with…
Research has become increasingly reliant on software, serving as the driving force behind bioinformatics, high performance computing, physics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, to name a few. While substantial progress has been…
In the last decades, scientific software has graduated from a hidden side-product to a first-class member of the astrophysics literature. We aim to quantify the activity and impact of software development for astronomy, using a systematic…
The principle that research output should be open has, in recent years, been in-creasingly applied to data and software. Licensing is a key aspect to openness. Navi-gating the landscape of open source licenses can lead to complex…
The amount of data produced by large observational facilities and space missions has led to the archiving and on-line accessibility of much of this data, available to the entire astronomical community. This allows a much wider…
Astrophysics and cosmology are rich with data. The advent of wide-area digital cameras on large aperture telescopes has led to ever more ambitious surveys of the sky. Data volumes of entire surveys a decade ago can now be acquired in a…
This white paper offers cautionary observations about the planning and development of new, large radio astronomy instruments. Complexity is a strong cost driver so every effort should be made to assign differing science requirements to…
Harnessing the sheer discovery potential of gravitational wave astronomy will require bold, deliberate, and sustained efforts to train and develop the requisite workforce. The next decade requires a strategic plan to build -- from the…
Advanced space technology systems often face high fixed costs, can serve limited non-government demand, and are significantly driven by non-market motivations. While increased entrepreneurial activity and national ambitions in space have…
Background: Open Source Software (OSS) fuels our global digital infrastructure but is commonly maintained by small groups of people whose time and labor represent a depletable resource. For the OSS projects to stay sustainable, i.e., viable…
Most scientists need software to perform their research (Barker et al., 2020; Carver et al., 2022; Hettrick, 2014; Hettrick et al., 2014; Switters and Osimo, 2019), and neuroscientists are no exception. Whether we work with reaction times,…
In the past two years, the environment within which astronomers conduct their data analysis and management has rapidly changed. Working Groups associated with international societies and Big Data projects have emerged to support and…
NASA regards data handling and archiving as an integral part of space missions, and has a strong track record of serving astrophysics data to the public, beginning with the the IRAS satellite in 1983. Archives enable a major science return…