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A New Network for Gamma-Ray Bursts and other Immediate Astronomical Events
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| Objectives We plan to leverage the NASA Gamma-ray bursts Coordinates Network (GCN) with a new system, called VO-GCN,
layered on the VOEvent standard of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The old GCN distributes alerts of
transient astronomical phenomena from a narrow range of NASA spacecraft to a small group of power-users, and has been very
successful over its 14 years, but now there many more event streams that should be distributed by multiple channels to multiple
communities, and a potential for exciting new science through automated decisions and correlation studies. Our proposal leverages
NASA assets with those of the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), Caltech, NOAO, and UC Berkeley to address this future. The
proposed system unifies many event streams from missions such as: GLAST, Pann-Starrs, LISA, IceCube, EXIST, LSST, NOAO
Surveys, Palomar-QUEST, OGLE, SDSSSS, and others; as well as incorporating archival data through NVO web services, and
allowing sophisticated studies of correlations in past event streams. Technology The proposed software will be based on the VOEvent
standard (voevent.org), a recommended standard of the IVOA. Event notices are represented in XML, a structured format that allows
the event author great flexibility, but also allows receiving software to understand and take action. The proposed system will have three
basic components: (1) A new version of GCN called VO-GCN, to run at NASA/GSFC, with access to the growing set of NASA events
and advertised to the GCN subscriber base; (2) Relay stations, aggregators, and repositories of events at Caltech, UC Berkeley, and
NOAO, allowing: subscription with sophisticated criteria, pooling additional event streams, correlation studies of past events;
Google-Sky presentation of event streams. (3) Client software and documentation so that subscribers can effectively utilize VO-GCN,
as well as authoring and disseminating followup events. The proposed system will allow subscribers to choose from several protocols:
eg, socket (improved from GCN), instant message, SMS text-message. email, RSS and web browser. Significance Transient events are
growing in importance to modern astronomy: instruments from NASA and other agencies are generating more and larger streams of
these, and many communities wish to subscribe to these event streams. We propose a general, flexible, peer-to-peer, robust, secure,
scalable solution for this infrastructure, to eventually replace GCN. Instead of a single source of gamma ray events for a few power
users delivered via boutique protocol, VO-GCN will be a part of the emerging global infrastructure of the time domain: a
standards-based vision of multiple federated event streams shared by peers and evaluated by decision support. |
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