Toward a National Virtual Observatory: Science goals, technical challenges, and implementation plan

The National Academy of Science Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee, in its new Decadal survey entitled Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium, recommends, as a first priority, the establishment of a National Virtual Observatory. The NVO would link the archival data sets of space- and ground-based observatories, the catalogs of multi-wavelength surveys, and the computational resources necessary to support comparison and cross-correlation among these resources. This White Paper describes the scientific opportunities and technical challenges of an NVO, and lays out an implementation strategy aimed at realizing the goals of the NVO in cost-effective manner. The NVO will depend on inter-agency cooperation, distributed development, and distributed operations. It will challenge the astronomical community, yet provide new opportunities for scientific discovery that were unimaginable just a few years ago.