Grand opening of the European JWST Archive at the ESAC Science Data Centre
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the next major space science observatory and will complement and extend the discoveries that the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has made so far. NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) have participated together in the design, construction and operations definition of this great space observatory that will allow astronomers to understand the Early Universe, evolution of galaxies over the time, the stellar life cycle and the properties of both Solar System and extrasolar planets, including the search for the building blocks of life. Providing astronomers with an easy access to observations that will lead to such a set of top-level discoveries requires a robust and user friendly access.
The ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC) has been in charge of providing a European JWST Archive (eJWST) predominantly aimed at the European scientific community but open to all scientists around the world. Within the established partnership of NASA, ESA and CSA, we are making use of common procedures and tools in order to synchronise JWST metadata and data contents mirror of the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) JWST archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The ESDC has developed a carefully designed graphical user interface plus several backend services based on Virtual Observatory (VO) protocols to access both private (data stored at STScI) and public observations (data also stored at ESDC).
We will describe the graphical user interface and the integration of ESASky to allow users to put JWST observations data and metadata in the context of multi-wavelength science , and several viewers developed for quick exploration of data cubes and images. Being a fully Table Access Protocol (TAP) based archive, the eJWST Archive provides also several means to accelerate science by providing users access with dedicated python modules in packages such as an eJWST-specific Astroquery module and searches based on the ADQL query language.