The ALMA archive and its place in the astronomy of the future

TL;DR

The paper discusses ALMA's data management system and explores how future astronomical observatories will evolve to handle increasing data complexity, emphasizing user experience and integrated data pipelines.

Contribution

It links ALMA's design principles to future trends in observatory data management and scientific workflows.

Findings

ALMA's archive manages 200 TB of data annually.

Future observatories will focus on user experience and data pipelines.

Science will increasingly rely on integrated, end-to-end data solutions.

Abstract

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, is the largest astronomical project in existence. While ALMA's capabilities are ramping up, Early Science observations have started. The ALMA Archive is at the center of the operations of the telescope array and is designed to manage the 200 TB of data that will be taken each year, once the observatory is in full operations. We briefly describe design principles. The second part of this paper focuses on how astronomy is likely to evolve as the amount and complexity of data taken grows. We argue that in the future observatories will compete for astronomers to work with their data, that observatories will have to reorient themselves to from providing good data only to providing an excellent end-to-end user-experience with all its implications, that science-grade data-reduction pipelines will become an integral part of the design of a new observatory or instrument and that all this evolution will have a deep impact on how astronomers will do science. We show how ALMA's design principles are in line with this paradigm.