A Brief Introduction of China-VO |
Virtual Observatory of China (China-VO) is a consortium initiated by National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC) and Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) project. At present, China-VO partners include:
- Department of Astronomy, Peking University
- Astrophysics Center, Tsinghua University
- Yunnan Astronomical Observatory, NAOC, Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
A virtual observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and computing & analyzing tools, which utilize the Internet to form a scientific research environment in which astronomical research programs can be conducted. In much the same way as a real observatory consists of telescopes, each with a collection of unique astronomical instruments, the VO consists of a collection of data centers each with unique collections of astronomical data, software systems and processing capabilities.
LAMOST is a meridian reflecting Schmidt telescope. Using active optics technique to control its reflecting corrector makes it a unique astronomical instrument in combining large aperture with wide field of view. The available large focal plane may accommodate up to 4000 fibers, by which the collected light of distant and faint celestial objects down to 20.5 magnitude is fed into the spectrographs, promising a very high spectrum acquiring rate of ten-thousands of spectra per night. It will bring Chinese astronomy into the 21century with a leading role in wide field spectroscopy and in the fields of large scale and large sample astronomy and astrophysics.
The telescope will be located at the Xinglong Station of National Astronomical Observatory. The project is begun officially in 1997 and planned to be completed in 2004, with its budget of RMB 235 million yuan (about 27.65 million USD).
Based on layered GRID infrastructure, China-VO mainly addresses following three tasks:
Astronomical Data Interoperation
China-VO will cooperate with other VO projects to solve some common challenges including the definition of a whole set of interoperability protocols.
Spectrum Auto-process
China-VO will mate with LAMOST. Being characteristic as a powerful spectroscopic sky survey telescope, LAMOST needs and will provide a software toolkit to automatically process its huge spectral data. China-VO will act as a key role in developing the toolkit and making it available to globe Virtual Observatory.
VO-enabled LAMOST
The sky survey of LAMOST needs a well-predefined observation target catalog, which will benefit from the abundant international astronomical archives interconnected through International VO.
The large data set of LAMOST spectroscopic sky survey is very valuable for astronomy and astrophysics. The core task for China-VO is to make LAMOST scientific archives online accessible. It needs much work to do, for example the definition of metadata standard, data model, archive publication and so on.
The need for VOs has also been recognized by other astronomical communities. The American National Academy of Science Decadal Survey of Astronomy recommended the funding of a National Virtual Observatory in the US. Similar efforts are also underway in Europe, UK, India, Australia, Russia and Japan. The IVOA was constituted at the ESO/ESA/NASA/NSF Conference, "Towards an International Virtual Observatory" held at Garching, Germany on June 10-14, 2002.
