The LOFAR LTA is a long-established distributed archive and access facility, part of the LOFAR Research Infrastructure. It is currently the largest radio astronomical archive in the World already exceeding 55 PB from LOFAR’s past 13 years of operations. The LTA provides a central, and key, resource for all observed LOFAR astronomical science programs where the data become public within 12 months of first creation. Currently, the LTA mostly hosts instrumental data, which still require considerable processing to be ready for scientific analysis. Processing to turn the LTA data into scientifically valuable products is computationally expensive, time consuming, and requires expert domain knowledge. Innovative techniques to handle these issues are now available. Therefore, services are under development to generate science-ready data. By doing so, LOFAR will attract an even wider community of users to exploit its data and generate a dramatic increase of the science output from the instrument.
Main technical chracteristics
- distributed infrastructure (3 archive sites distributed across Europe)
- hosting more than 55 PB of data
Website: https://lta.lofar.eu/