Astra

Astra is the analysis framework for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS V) Milky Way Mapper. The purpose of Astra is to manage the analysis of reduced data products from SDSS V and to streamline data releases.

Milky Way Mapper will produce data products that differ from previous generations of SDSS. High-resolution infrared spectra will continue to be acquired using the APOGEE spectrographs, but this will be complemented with low-resolution optical spectra. A wide range of scientific targets (e.g., red giants, main-sequence exoplanet host stars, white dwarfs) will be observed by both instruments. This change in strategy requires a framework to manage the analysis of targets, to encourage improvements to existing analysis approaches, and to streamline the data release process.

How it works

Astra uses a directed acyclic graph to figure out which analysis tasks need to be run on what observations. Astra may initiate many different analysis tasks, depending on the kind of source (e.g., white dwarf, FGK-type star). Since these analysis routines will likely improve with time, Astra stores all version information and data provenance. This allows results to be reproducible, tracked, and compared to previous sets of results.