Michael S. Swam (Space Telescope Science Institute), Daryl A. Swade (Space Telescope Science Institute)
Reference URL: http://www.dpt.stsci.edu/otfc
An On-the-Fly Calibration System (OTFC) is being developed for selected instruments of the Hubble Space Telescope with a primary goal of providing HST-Archive users with the most up-to-date calibration in their archive retrievals. The first instrument selected for this project is the Wide-Field/Planetary Camera-2 (WFPC-2), and a data calibration pipeline for the WFPC-2 has been developed for OTFC using the OPUS pipeline architecture. This paper will describe the design of the OTFC WFPC-2 calibration pipeline and the many benefits of using the OPUS architecture as the basis for this design. These benefits include distributed multi-processing capabilities, reliable and robust function (the Hubble Space Telescope data reduction pipeline has been using OPUS for almost 3 years), high levels of code reuse, ease of integration of third-party products, and short development timescales.