A fully automated data center for the space-borne hard X-ray Compton polarimeter POLAR developed at PSI

Abstract

Abstract Constant data inflow from the hard X-ray polarimeter POLAR onboard of the Chinese Space Laboratory TG-2 requires fully automated and safe guarded data processing. For this purpose, a dedicated data center was established at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). This paper presents its design concept and structure, and describes the data flow and data products, data processing pipelines, quick-look utilities and web-based applications. Because the amount of POLAR telemetry data can reach up to 100 GB daily, specialized software and hardware with dedicated architecture are required to store and process this large amount of data. POLAR is a space-borne detector to precisely measure the linear polarization of hard X-rays emitted from solar flares and gamma-ray bursts in the energy range of 50–500 keV. It was launched into a low earth orbit on September 15th, 2016.