• Mazzarella, Joseph

Abstract

The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) assists and accelerates research for scientists, educators and students around the world by distilling and synthesizing data across the spectrum and providing value-added derived quantities for objects beyond the Milky Way. For nearly three decades the system has been growing and improving to meet the needs of scientists as information technologies advance. Over the past year alone, the NED team released the result of fusing data for 470 million sources in the 2MASS Point Source Catalog with data previously joined from over 110,000 catalogs and journal articles (doubling the size of the database), and we introduced a new user interface that streamlines common queries and provides interactive visualizations of linked tables and graphics in the search results. This year we plan to complete the integration of 750 million sources from the AllWISE Source Catalog along with data from thousands of journal articles, and deliver improved capabilities in the user interface. In this talk, I will briefly review recent science applications that have used NED and describe plans for enhancing the system further to meet the challenges of supporting science discovery from data joined from future missions and surveys covering billions of galaxies and candidates. For example, coupling NED with popular science platform technologies (e.g, Project Jupyter) in a common ecosystem with other archives will enable users to run a wide range of statistical and machine learning algorithms to make discoveries directly from NED's unique data fusion. I will close with questions for the community to solicit input that helps prioritize new data sets and functionality to optimize science opportunities leveraging NED in the 2020s.