Phoenix: Automatic Science Processing Of Eso-Vlt Data

ESO has implemented a process to automatically create science-grade data products and offer them to the scientific community, ready for scientific analysis. This process, called 'phoenix', is built on two main concepts: 1. a certification procedure for pipelines which includes a code review and, if necessary, upgrade; and 2. a certification procedure for calibrations which are processed into master calibrations, scored and trended. These master calibrations contain all information about the intrinsic instrumental variations and instabilities inevitable for ground-based telescopes. The phoenix process then automatically processes all science data using the certified pipeline and the certified master calibrations. Phoenix currently focuses on spectroscopic data. The first phoenix project has been the processing of all science data from UVES, ESO's high-resolution Echelle spectrograph at the VLT. More than 100,000 Echelle spectra of point sources, from begin of operations (March 2000) until now, have been reduced and are available to the public from the ESO archive, http://archive.eso.org/cms/eso-data/eso-data-products.html. The phoenix process will also feed future UVES data into the archive. The second project has been X-SHOOTER slit spectroscopy which currently has more than 30,000 Echelle spectra from the UV to the infrared (up to 2.5 mu m). The phoenix process will be extended to other, mostly spectroscopic, instruments with certified pipelines, like FLAMES. Also, all future VLT instruments will be supported by phoenix.