The Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope’s produce scientific data products that are used by the entire world-wide astronomical community in their pursuit of original research. As such, it is vital that those data products have the highest scientific quality possible, and also that they be reproducible when used for different research projects than the original observer may have intended. The data processing pipelines for these telescopes therefore use highly configured software environments, use strict control over all ancillary data that’s utilized in the processing, and go to great lengths to document, for the user, exactly how the products were created. The software is open source and the ancillary data are publicly available to any user who wishes to recreate and possibly refine the products on their own, in order to fit the exact scientific needs of their particular research program.
Dr. Howard Bushouse is an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD. He received his Ph.D. in 1986 from the University of Illinois and subsequently held two post-doctoral positions at NASA Ames Research Center and Northwestern University. In 1993 he joined the STScI, which is the science operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope and soon will be the operations center for the new James Webb Space Telescope. He has been an integral part of the design and development of data calibration pipelines for three of the scientific instruments on Hubble, and is now the team lead for the development of calibration pipelines for all James Webb instruments. The data calibration pipelines process all data coming from the space-based observatories and make science-ready products available to all astronomers. His research interests over the years have focused on star formation activity in colliding galaxies, as well as the physics behind flaring activity from the massive black hole that resides at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.