Make a Planned Observations table

[kelle]

This is motivated by approved/planned JWST observations. Should also use the Instrument/Telescope/Mode reference tables. Can ref a JWST PID as the reference.

@dr-rodriguez , does STSCI already provide a searchable database of planned/approved observations?

[dr-rodriguez]

It's funny you should ask this since once of the reasons I missed the SIMPLE meeting this week was a JWST meeting that included a topic about a bug in the MAST list of JWST planned observations.

So yes, by using MAST (either the main interface, astroquery.mast, pyvo, TAP, etc), you can search for JWST planned observations by constraining your queries by obs_collection = JWST and calibrationLevel = -1

Note that the planned observations get periodically refreshed on a daily schedule. This is to ensure that observations that are actually taken move from planned to executed, and similarly any deletions/withdrawn cases get removed.

The bug we have been addressing this week, which will hopefully be installed in our production services by the end of the month, is that the deletions are not accurately queried so legitimate planned observations are being cleared out and re-inserted the following day.

[dr-rodriguez]

Discussed briefly but to capture it here:

• We would need to search the list of programs to see which ones may have targets we may be interested in.
• For targets that are in SIMPLE, we can search MAST for that program in astroquery or through the interface.
• We can then store the basic metadata information in a table, this can just be the program/instrument information. The pointer to the data can be an exercise for the user. That is, the goal of this table is to list which programs/targets have been/will be observed.

[kelle]

MAST made a new thing which makes this possible. https://mast.stsci.edu/duplication/#/search.