Cherenkov Telescope Array: From High-Energy Astrophysics to an Astronomical Observatory
Very-High-Energy gammma-ray astronomy is now moving from a set of independent "experiments" managed by closed collaborations to an open observatory model. The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the first ground-based gamma-ray observatory for gamma-ray astronomy at very-high energies and will produce 10s of PB of raw gamma-ray data per year, which must be processed into a much smaller volume of scientific data that must be publicly accessible to the worldwide astronomical and particle physics communities. We will present an overview of plans for managing and processing this data and how we expect to disseminate the final products to users by using and adapting existing astronomy standards. In particular, we will discuss the challenges and benefits we have encountered when bridging the approaches from a traditionally particle-physics-oriented community with those of traditional astronomy, from building an experiment to constructing an open observatory, and what solutions are currently proposed.
