Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) Overview
SWAS Overview SWAS Source Table SWAS Moving Target List SWAS Primary Data Access

Overview

The Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) was a NASA SmallExplorer Program (SMEX) mission that launched on December 5, 1998 and made initial observations until July 21, 2004 followed by a 3 month re-activation period in June 2005 (after a year of stand-by operation) to observe the effects of the Deep Impact probe's collision with Comet P/Tempel 1. SWAS measured the amount of water and molecular oxygen in interstellar clouds, and also the amounts of carbon monoxide and atomic carbon, which are believed to be major reservoirs of carbon in these clouds. Its overall goal has been to gain a greater understanding of star formation by determining the composition of interstellar clouds and establishing the means by which these clouds cool as they collapse to form stars and planets. SWAS focused on the following spectral lines: Water (H2O) at 556.936 GHz, Molecular oxygen (O2) at 487.249 GHz, Neutral carbon (CI) at 492.161 GHz, Isotopic carbon monoxide (13CO) at 550.927 GHz, and Isotopic water (H218O) at 548.676 GHz. The spacecraft has made detailed 1 degree x 1 degree maps of many giant molecular and dark cloud cores during the first five years of the mission. SWAS made new data public every six months, and the final release was made in mid-2005. The on-line data constitutes the tenth SWAS public data release and consists of a complete set of SWAS data from mission day 0049 (the first day of usable science data) to mission day 2089. 96 sources were observed during this release period, with 40 of them being new sources observed for the first time by SWAS. The previous releases - 5th through 9th are available upon request. Please read the explanatory material if unfamiliar with this set of data.

If you use SWAS data, please cite the journal article Melnick et al. (2000) and the dataset Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.26131/IRSA522.

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Data Set Characteristics

Data ProductDescriptionData Access
Spectra SWAS

SWAS Documentation

Documentation
README
Explanatory Material
Additional Documentation
SWAS Project Data Management Plan Highlights
SWAS Science Content