The WFCAM science archive and other WFAU work

The Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) of the Institute for Astronomy; University of Edinburgh, will host the data taken with WFCAM, the new wide-field infrared imager on UKIRT. This, the WFCAM Science Archive, is the final stage in the dates flow from telescope to user. Starting in 2005, WFCAM will carry out five main surveys over a 7 year period. Observations will typically result in 100Gb of data per night and generate a total archive size of tens of terabytes. In addition to holding data, science archives should provide for fast and highly flexible querying and science driven data products that are significantly enhanced with respect to the ingest data. With this in mind, and following an agreed set of requirements laid out in a science requirements analysis document, WFAU designed the WFCAM Science Archive (WSA) described here. Areas covered include hardware choices, software architecture, curation tasks and user access. Archive scalability is also a key issue as the WFCAM Science Archive forms the first phase VISTA Data Flow System (VDFS) science archive. WFAU's involvement with the VDFS and other developments are briefly discussed.