Archiving Tng Data

The TNG (Telescopio Nazionale Galileo), a 3.5 meter telescope derived from ESO's NTT which will see rst light in La Palma during 1996, will be one of the rst cases where operations will be carried out following an end-to-end data management scheme. An archive of both technical and scientiic data will be produced directly at the telescope as a natural extension of the data handling chain. This is possible thanks to the total integration of the data management facilities with the telescope control system. In this paper, the archive system at the TNG is described in terms of archiving facilities, production of hard media and exportable database tables, on-line technical, calibration and transit archives, interaction with the quick-look utilities for the diierent instruments, and data access and retrieval mechanisms. The interfaces of the system with other TNG subsystems are discussed, and rst results obtained testing a prototype implementation with a simulated data ow are shown.