6
Best Practices and Recommendations
As NASA builds and operates space astronomy observatories in the future, it will need to assign mission responsibilities to existing astronomy science centers or develop new centers. NASA is also responsible for assessing the effectiveness of its current portfolio of science centers.
Through the course of this study, the committee obtained written information and heard presentations from the leaders of the various science centers. The committee also invited experts, from research scientists to high school science teachers, to speak with the committee to explore the full range of center services. The chair of the committee also visited the science centers. Informed by these experiences and the data it gathered for the study, the committee makes three recommendations on existing and potential future astronomy science centers.
Recommendation 1. NASA should establish a large new science center only when the following criteria are met: (1) the existing science centers lack the capacity to support a major new scientific initiative and (2) there is an imminent need to develop an infrastructure to support a broad base of users.
The committee concludes that the four existing major astronomy science centers are sufficient to meet the needs of the astronomical community for the foreseeable future. These four centers—the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC), the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) at Goddard Space Flight Center, the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology, and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)—have evolved to meet the community needs to support high-energy astrophysics (at HEASARC and CXC); optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared astronomy (at STScI); and far-infrared astronomy (at IPAC). In addition, a number of smaller missions provide their own user support while they are active and transfer the responsibility for data archiving to the major centers after their active phases.
Should the criteria in Recommendation 1 be met and a decision be taken to create a new center (or centers), the committee has identified a set of best practices that can assist in developing the new center(s) (Box 6.1).
Recommendation 2. NASA should adopt a set of best practices as guiding principles to ensure the effectiveness of existing flagship and archival NASA astronomy science centers and to select the operational functions of any future centers.
Recommendation 3. NASA should ensure that its astronomy science centers cooperate among themselves and with other agencies to develop strategies and plans for
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Developing common protocols and formats for proposal entry;
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Developing a universal infrastructure for data formats and metadata, archiving, and retrieval and analysis tools; and
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Providing curriculum materials and professional development programs for K-12 teachers.
As data on cosmic phenomena become available in many wavelength bands, the process of obtaining, analyzing, and interpreting them is becoming an increasingly important mode of astronomical discovery. Providing tools that are user-friendly, platform-independent, and common to all wavelength bands will enable the community to participate in multiwavelength research. For example, it is inefficient and wasteful not only of programming time but also of a working scientist’s time for the centers to require independent protocols and formats for proposal entry.
Likewise, the process of discovery through analysis of multiwavelength data sets becomes much more efficient if the individual scientist can work with data that are stored in universal formats and can be retrieved and analyzed with common software packages. Moreover, these common formats and protocols should be compatible with data from ground-based as well as space-based observatories. These are the goals of the National Virtual Observatory (NVO). NASA should ensure that the science centers cooperate among themselves and with NSF-supported observatories such as Gemini and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to develop strategies to achieve this vision.
The development of both K-12 classroom resources and infrastructure for the continued education of teachers is critical for ensuring U.S. competitiveness in the 21st century. The science centers can contribute significantly to this effort, but they do not have the resources to do everything on their own. NASA should ensure that its science centers cooperate among themselves and with other entities, particularly those supported by the NSF, to develop and implement a strategy for leveraging their EPO efforts to reach the education community.
BOX 6.1 Best Practices for NASA Astronomy Science Centers Mission Operations NASA astronomy science centers can best operate the spacecraft and process the resulting data if they
Science Operations NASA astronomy science centers can best support their scientific user communities if they
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Data and Archiving Science centers can best process, store, and disseminate their data if they
Education and Public Outreach Science centers can best communicate their results to the public if they
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