About this Article

The STScI help desk provides a service to anyone in the community who has a question, request, or feedback about any of the operations or policies at STScI. The STScI help desk is composed of several portals to better address the community needs, namely: Hubble Space Telescope (HST), James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Roman Space Telescope (Roman), Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), Office of Public Outreach (OPO), and Information Technology Services Division (ITSD). In this article we discuss why you might not have gotten a response to your ticket as well as tips for what information to include in your ticket. We then generally describe what to expect when you submit a ticket to the help desk. We also provide several useful links, including direct links to each help desk portal, and information for some commonly asked questions.

Never got a response to my help desk ticket

Are you wondering why no one responded to your help desk ticket? It could be that the response went to your junk or spam folder. Once you submitted a ticket or emailed the help desk, you should have received an automatic reply from STARS (stars@stsci.edu). Please see the attached example of the autonomic reply. If you did not see this, there is a good chance that the emails from the help desk are being filtered out and have either gone into spam/junk or being blocked and not delivered. Please check your spam or junk folders, or contact your local IT team to make sure our address (stars@stsci.edu) is not being blocked. If this is not the case and you still have not gotten a response, please submit another ticket via the web portal or email mentioning your earlier request. Please note that you can check the status of and any responses to your ticket via the web portal, if you submitted it via the web portal instead of by email.

Tips for helping us help you

It is best practice to submit your ticket via the web portal (see links below under 'Resources'). This allows you to send the ticket to the help desk that you think is the most applicable, which can expedite the response. For tickets about Roman, please note that the help desk is supported by both STScI and IPAC/Caltech, where any tickets about WFI in Spectroscopic Mode or the Coronagraph will be answered by experts at IPAC. Submitting a ticket via a web portal also allows you to monitor the progress of your ticket. The HST and MAST help desks do accept tickets via email at help@stsci.edu and archive@stsci.edu, respectively, and the tickets will be moved to the appropriate desk (there may be a delay while your ticket is in triage).

Please have all the relevant information and details so we can more efficiently have your ticket addressed by the correct people.  In general, it is better to provide more details than less. Here are some examples of important information to include, as appropriate to your circumstances: which instrument and actual dataset name you are using, specifics about what programs you are running and why as well as any options you have set, current draft APT file, the version of software you are using or the conda environment and version, any plots that illustrate the issue, and any error reports or logs.

What to expect after submitting a help desk ticket

After you submit a ticket via the web portal or by email, you will get an automatic reply from STARS that your ticket was submitted. It also provides a link with your ticket number. Our policy is to reply to your request within two business days letting you know the status of your ticket, and we try to respond as soon as possible, depending on complexity of the ticket and urgency. Please note that STScI is closed on the following USA holidays: New Years day, Martin Luther King Jr day, Memorial day, Juneteenth, Independence day (July 4), Labor day, Thanksgiving and Christmas (December 25).

You can reply or comment on your ticket via email or via the web portal. You can also add attachments to your ticket or add people to the watchlist, which allows others to see and respond to your ticket. If your ticket is transferred to another help desk portal, for example from HST to JWST or HST to MAST, you will be notified by STARS that your ticket was moved. If your ticket was moved to another help desk within the same portal, such as from HST general help desk to HST APT, there is no automatic email notification, but your ticket on the web portal will be updated. 

If you did not get a response to either your initial request (see above) or to a reply, please send in a new ticket referencing the old ticket. The person in charge of your ticket may be on vacation or changed positions so it best to send a fresh ticket where more people will be notified. Once the ticket is answered, it will be set to 'resolved.' Note that many of the help desk portals do not 'close' tickets, only resolve them. This enables users to respond to their tickets even after being resolved with any follow-up questions or comments (the ticket will go back to being 'in progress').

Resources

Here are the links to the different help desk portals at STScI:

• HST help desk web portal
• JWST help desk web portal
• Roman help desk web portal
• MAST (archive) help desk web portal
• OPO (Office of Public Outreach) help desk web portal
• ITSD (internal/STScI employees) help desk web portal

Other useful links and information for commonly asked questions:

• APT: Please see the APT article.
• IRAF: No longer maintained or supported at STScI. Many of the IRAF functionalities can be found in python. Please read the IRAF knowledge-base article for more information.
• stenv: Common environment to be used for HST and JWST, stenv supersedes astroconda. For more information, please see the stenv knowledge-base article.

Examples

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Karla Peterson and Michele De La Pena for their thoughtful comments. We would also like to thank the other help desks leads and deputies for their feedback, namely Lauren Miller, Alyssa Guzman, Nicolas Flagey, Bryan Hilbert, Dario Fadda, and Deborah Kenny.