Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph Instrument Handbook for Cycle 17

1.7 Non-proprietary STIS Data

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During regular STIS operations, the majority of existing STIS data is non-proprietary and available for retrieval from the HST Data Archive. The data include, but are not limited to, observations obtained in the Second Servicing Mission Early Release programs (EROs-see Ap.J. Letters, Vol. 492, No. 2, 1998), the STIS Archival Pure Parallel Program, the ongoing calibration programs (see Chapter 17), data taken in connection with the Hubble Deep Fields (North,  South, and Ultra Deep Fields), and GTO and GO observations that are no longer proprietary. You can use either the HST Archive Web interface or StarView to search for such data directly. Any such data may be freely acquired, as described in the HST Data Handbook, for technical or scientific use. Examples of non-proprietary STIS science data are shown as illustrative examples interspersed in this Handbook. At present, all STIS data in the archive are non-proprietary.

All STIS data collected prior to the Side-2 failure on 2004-Aug-03 were reprocessed through a modified version of the ingest pipeline, and the archive databases were repopulated. This allowed any changes in the processing software and reference file updates to be reflected in the archive catalog. Unlike during original ingest, during this recalibration all raw and calibrated data files produced were saved. This static archive has now been made available to the community in place of OTFR. This will allow old STIS data obtained prior to the failure in 2004 to be retrieved without waiting for the OTFR procedures to run. See also:

http://archive.stsci.edu/hstonline/.

As part of this STIS re-calibration and re-ingest, those science exposures that lack auto-wavecals, but for which GO wavecals are available, were identified, and the science data and lamp exposures were combined into associations that treat the GO wavecals in the same way as auto-wavecals. This task is currently in progress, and completion is expected sometime during 2007.

As a side effect of the association of GO wavecals, the science exposures involved have new dataset names, and the lamp exposures now used as wavecals will no longer appear in the archive catalog as independent datasets.