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Swift Data Access

GCN Notices

GCN (GRB Coordinates Network) notices specific to Swift are generated automatically and are stored in the local GCN pages. The local archive updates immediately new data are received.

A description of the GCN system is provided by GSFC; GCN notices are also archived at the GSFC Swift GCN site

More detailed information is relayed in the Circulars and Reports.

Quick Look

Data products are made available as Quick Look data as soon as they have been processed by the Swift Data Center (SDC) at GSFC (a few hours after the observation occurs). The data remain on the Quick Look sites (UK, US, IT) for one week, after which the files are moved to the main archive.

Archive data

Guide to the Swift Archive (pdf)

The UK Swift Science Data Centre provides two ways of accessing the Swift archive:

Swift Download Portal -
Simple interface allowing searching by name and target id.
Full archive query tool -
Comprehensive search tool to query the catalogue of Swift observations.

If you want to download all the data for a target, then you probably want to use the download portal. However, this only allows you to find observations by the name of the target, or by searching through a target list for a given year/month. If this is not sufficient, for example you may want to do a cone search, you need the more advanced Catalogue Query interface. The lists below show briefly the pros and cons of the two interfaces.

Download Portal

Advantages

Disadvantages

Catalogue Query

Advantages

Disadvantages



Catalogues

There are several different catalogues available, created at the UKSSDC:

Live XRT GRB catalogue.
An automatically-updated catalogue of GRBs detected by the XRT.
LSXPS.
The Living Swift XRT Point Source (SXPS) catalogue. Constantly updated.
2SXPS.
The second edition of our Swift XRT Point Source (SXPS) catalogue. Released 25 November 2019.
1SXPS.
The original edition of our Swift XRT Point Source (SXPS) catalogue. Released 21 November 2013. This is superseded by 2SXPS.


Products

An overview of the convention for assigning Observation IDs is available.