The Montage Image Mosaic Service: Custom Image Mosaics On-Demand

The Montage software suite has proven extremely useful as a general engine for reprojecting, background matching, and mosaicking astronomical image data from a wide variety of sources. The processing algorithms support all common World Coordinate System (WCS) projections and have been shown to be both astrometrically accurate and flux conserving. The background ‘matching’ algorithm does not remove background flux but rather finds the best compromise background based on all the input and matches the individual images to that. The Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech, has now wrapped the Montage software as a CGI service and provided a compute and request management infrastructure capable of producing approximately 2 TBytes / day of image mosaic output (e.g. from 2MASS and SDSS data). Besides the basic Montage engine, this service makes use of a 16-node LINUX cluster (dual processor, dual core) and the ROME request management software developed by the National Virtual Observatory (NVO). ROME uses EJB/database technology to manage user requests, queue processing and load balance between users, and managing job monitoring and user notification. The Montage service will be extended to process userdefined data collections, including private data uploads

Thermodynamics of clay – Drug complex dispersions: Isothermal titration calorimetry and high-performance liquid chromatography

An understanding of the thermodynamics of the complexation process utilized in sustaining drug release in clay matrices is of great importance. Several characterisation techniques as well as isothermal calorimetry were utilized in investigating the adsorption process of a model cationic drug (diltiazem hydrochloride, DIL) onto a pharmaceutical clay system (magnesium aluminium silicate, MAS). X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and optical microscopy confirmed the successful formation of the DIL-MAS complexes. Drug quantification from the complexes demonstrated variable behaviour in the differing media used with DIL degrading to desacetyl diltiazem hydrochloride (DC-DIL) in the 2 M HCl media. Here also, the authors report for the first time two binding processes that occurred for DIL and MAS. A competitor binding model was thus proposed and the thermodynamics obtained suggested their binding processes to be enthalpy driven and entropically unfavourable. This information is of great importance for a formulator as care and consideration should be given with appropriate media selection as well as the nature of binding in complexes

The NStED Exoplanet Transit Survey Service

The NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (NStED) is a general purpose stellar archive with the aim of providing support for NASA's planet finding and characterization goals, stellar astrophysics, and the planning of NASA and other space missions. There are two principal components of NStED: a database of (currently) 140,000 nearby stars and exoplanet-hosting stars, and an archive dedicated to high-precision photometric surveys for transiting exoplanets. We present a summary of the latter component: the NStED Exoplanet Transit Survey Service (NStED-ETSS), along with its content, functionality, tools, and user interface. NStED-ETSS currently serves data from the TrES Survey of the Kepler Field as well as dedicated photometric surveys of four stellar clusters. NStED-ETSS aims to serve both the surveys and the broader astronomical community by archiving these data and making them available in a homogeneous format. Examples of usability of ETSS include investigation of any time-variable phenomena in data sets not studied by the original survey team, application of different techniques or algorithms for planet transit detections, combination of data from different surveys for given objects, statistical studies, etc. NStED-ETSS can be accessed at \tt{http://nsted.ipac.caltech.edu}Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 253rd IAU Symposium: "Transiting Planets", May 2008, Cambridge, MA. 4 pages, 2 figure

Native-like flow properties of an artificial spider silk dope

Recombinant spider silk has emerged as a biomaterial that can circumvent problems associated with synthetic and naturally derived polymers, while still fulfilling the potential of the native material. The artificial spider silk protein NT2RepCT can be produced and spun into fibers without the use of harsh chemicals and here we evaluate key properties of NT2RepCT dope at native-like concentrations. We show that NT2RepCT recapitulates not only the overall secondary structure content of a native silk dope but also emulates its viscoelastic rheological properties. We propose that these properties are key to biomimetic spinning and that optimization of rheological properties could facilitate successful spinning of artificial dopes into fibers

The Design of the W. M. Keck Observatory Archive

The Michelson Science Center (MSC) and the W. M. Keck Observatory are building an archive that will serve data obtained at the Keck Observatory. The archive has begun operations and is ingesting Level 0 (uncalibrated) observations made with the recently upgraded High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES); these observations will be publicly accessible after expiration of a proprietary period. Observatory staff have begun using the archived data to determine the long-term performance of the HIRES instrument. The archive is housed at the Michelson Science Center (MSC) and employs a modular design with the following components: (1) Data Evaluation and Preparation: images from the telescope are evaluated and native FITS headers are converted to metadata that will support archiving; (2) Trans Pacific Data Transfer: metadata are sent daily by e-mail and ingested into the archive in a highly fault tolerant fashion, and FITS images are written to DVDs and sent to MSC each week; (3) Science Information System: inherited from the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, it provides all the functionality needed to support database inquiries and processing of requests; and a Web-based (4) User Interface, a thin layer above the information system that accepts user requests and returns results. The design offers two major cost-saving benefits: it overcomes the geographical separation between the telescope and the archive and enables development at Keck and at MSC to proceed independently; and it permits direct inheritance of the IRSA architecture

Data and Metadata Management at the Keck Observatory Archive

A collaboration between the W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO) in Hawaii and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) in California, the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) was commissioned in 2004 to archive data from WMKO, which operates two classically scheduled 10 m ground-based telescopes. The data from Keck are not suitable for direct ingestion into the archive since the metadata contained in the original FITS headers lack the information necessary for proper archiving. The data pose a number of challenges for KOA: different instrument builders used different standards, and the nature of classical observing, where observers have complete control of the instruments and their observations, lead to heterogeneous data sets. For example, it is often difficult to determine if an observation is a science target, a sky frame, or a sky flat. It is also necessary to assign the data to the correct owners and observing programs, which can be a challenge for time-domain and target-of-opportunity observations, or on split nights, during which two or more principle investigators share a given night. In addition, having uniform and adequate calibrations is important for the proper reduction of data. Therefore, KOA needs to distinguish science files from calibration files, identify the type of calibrations available, and associate the appropriate calibration files with each science frame. We describe the methodologies and tools that we have developed to successfully address these difficulties, adding content to the FITS headers and “retrofitting" the metadata in order to support archiving Keck data, especially those obtained before the archive was designed. With the expertise gained from having successfully archived observations taken with all eight currently active instruments at WMKO, we have developed lessons learned from handling this complex array of heterogeneous metadata. These lessons help ensure a smooth ingestion of data not only for current but also future instruments, as well as a better experience for the archive user

An All-Sky 2MASS Mosaic Constructed on the TeraGrid

The Montage mosaic engine supplies on-request image mosaic services for the NVO astronomical community. A companion paper describes scientific applications of Montage. This paper describes one application in detail: the generation at SDSC of a mosaic of the 2MASS All-sky Image Atlas on the NSF TeraGrid. The goals of the project are: to provide a value-added 2MASS product that combines overlapping images to improve sensitivity; to demonstrate applicability of computing at-scale to astronomical missions and surveys, especially projects such as LSST; and to demonstrate the utility of the NVO Hyperatlas format. The numerical processing of an 8 TB, 32-bit survey to produce a 64-bit, 20 TB output atlas presented multiple scalability and operational challenges. An MPI Python module, MYMPI, was used to manage the alternately sequential and parallel steps of the Montage process. This allowed us to parallelize all steps of the mosaic process: that of many, sequential steps executing simultaneously for independent mosaics and that of a single MPI parallel job executing on many CPUs for a single mosaic. The Storage Resource Broker (SRB) was used to archive the output results in the Hyperatlas. The 2MASS mosaics are now being assessed for scientific quality. Around 130,000 CPU-hours were used to complete the mosaics. The output consists of 1734 plates spanning 6◦ for each of 3 bands. Each of the 5202 mosaics is roughly 4 GB in size, and each has been tiled into a 12×12 array of 26 MB files for ease of handling. The total size is about 20 TB in 750,000 tiles