The CSIRO ASKAP Science Data Archive (CASDA) provides the long term storage for ASKAP data products and the hardware and software facilities that enable astronomers to make use of these. Data products are stored at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, Western Australia.

ASKAP is a data driven facility where the data rates are extremely high. In full operations, the ASKAP data rates arriving at the Pawsey Centre will reach around 75 Petabytes (PB) per year. This is beyond the current ability to archive data and so raw data are not archived. Such high data rates require instead that ASKAP data processing is carried out using automated pipelines to produce ‘data products’ and associated metadata. These are stored and made available through the science archive. The archive can be thought of as the end stage of the full system.

ASKAP Early Science observations are due to begin later in 2016. So that users can gain experience and provide feedback to the CASDA team, CASDA now provides access to demonstration data products obtained during science commissioning and pilot observing programs that have been carried out with a small number of ASKAP antennas from the BETA array.