At the end of the mission, Princeton provided the National Space Science
Data Center (NSSDC)
with a
compact set of data on 9-track tapes as the final archive of the
Copernicus science mission. The data were formatted in such a
manner that special programs were needed to extract the information, bit
by bit, from the archive. Under a grant from NASA's Astrophysics Data
Program, the Laboratory for
Astronomy and Solar Physics and the IUE
Data Analysis Center have
converted the tape files into
FITS
format disk files and created an on-line archive of Copernicus
ultraviolet spectra.
There is one FITS file of raw scans for each of the 551 objects
observed by
Copernicus. These files can be retrieved from the
raw target list,
the
Copernicus search page,
and via the anonymous FTP at archive.stsci.edu in the /pub/copernicus/raw
subdirectory. The FITS files containing the raw spectral scans are
constructed using a Binary table extension and the proposed "variable
length array facility" as described in the NOST FITS Draft Standard.
Each row of the binary table contains the data from one spectral scan.
In addition to the raw data files, coadded contemporaneous scans from
the U1 high resolution channel (900-1560 Å) and U2 (900-1650 Å)
channel are available from
the
Copernicus Coadded Scan search page,
and via the anonymous ftp at archive.stsci.edu in the
U1 coadded scan directory
and the
U2 coadded scan directory
The files are
stored as standard Binary table FITS files using fixed length vector
fields. The files are intended primarily for quick-look data analysis.