To support ESO spectroscopic surveys in their Phase 3 preparations the format standard for data products to be submitted via Phase 3 has been expanded and now includes spectroscopic data, i.e. extracted, calibrated, and fully characterized one-dimensional spectra.

The new ESO Science Data Products Standard (Issue 4, Date 15/10/2012) is based on the standard definitions, which were previously published in the External Data Products Standard, Issue 3 (25/05/2012). Note that the data format standard for VISTA public survey products (images and catalogues) remains unchanged, meaning that issue 3 still may be used for the preparation of these data.

As the scope of the new standard was enlarged to science data products in general, the document title has been adjusted accordingly. External data providers are not affected by this modification.

ESO Science Data Products Standard (Issue 4, Date 15/10/2012)

As part of the ongoing effort of enabling access to historical ESO data, raw frames from the FEROS instrument taken between 2001-09-01 and 2003-10-15 have been recovered from offline media. These data are now available through the standard Archive query form.

The APEX query form now allows PIs and their delegates to download proprietary processed data. These data products are now transferred over the network, allowing PI's to access their data within a few weeks after they have been taken. It is expected that this lag will be reduced to a few days in the foreseeable future.

In addition to historical and public pipeline-processed data, the FEROS/HARPS query form now allows PIs and their delegates to query and download proprietary processed data.

At the end of 2010 the previous operator of the European Hubble Space Telescope Archive, the ST-ECF closed its doors. (see http://www.stecf.org/)

The Phase 3 infrastructure has been upgraded to enable the submission of science catalogue data from VISTA public surveys.

Following the successful publication of the data products from the VISTA public surveys (VVV, VIDEO, VMC, VHS) on 01.12.2011 (see announcement), the first data release from the ULTRAVISTA survey is now added to the list. The release consists of about ~ 87 GB high quality data products including the deep images in YJHKs broad bands and the NB118 image at the position of the COSMOS field, plus the single bands and multi-color catalogs.

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is a 2.6-m wide field optical survey telescope for the southern hemisphere located on the VLT platform at Cerro Paranal, Chile. It is equipped with just one focal plane instrument, OmegaCAM, a large format (16k x16k pixels) CCD camera built by an international consortium. It operates in the u,g,r,i,z SDSS bands, covering a corrected field of view of 1°x 1°.

The ESO Science Archive Facility now provides community access to the first data products from the VISTA public survey projects. Following one year and a half of successful scientific operations VISTA telescope, the VISTA public surveys have returned nearly 6 TB of reduced data products, which can be queried for and downloaded by the international community via a dedicated query interface at the ESO Science Archive Facility.

With the deployment of the CalSelector service, the generation of PIPack is discontinued as of November 4th, 2011. PI Packs created before that date will remain available online from the PI Packages service, but will not be updated anymore (also, please note that PIPacks created between October 1st and November 4th, 2011 only contain raw data).