Accessing LAMBDA data in the Cloud (AWS)

Intro

Beginning in 2023, the Year of Open Science, as part of NASA's Open Science Initiative, and in collaboration with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Open Data project, LAMBDA data are now available in the cloud. This effort is motivated by the need to increase the accessibility of this data in the broader community and to enable the kind of science that requires the significant resources of cloud computing.

For most of our community, the traditional workflow is to browse for the data through the LAMBDA product page and then download the datasets of interest.

Access

These data can currently be accessed by using the LAMBDA data catalog. LAMBDA URLs can be turned into URIs starting with "s3://nasa-lambda/". For WMAP, there is a small change to the path from "map" to "wmap" to clarify that it is the mission name. I.e.,

https://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/map/dr5/skymaps/9yr/smoothed/wmap_band_smth_iqumap_r9_9yr_K_v5.fits can also be found at s3://nasa-lambda/wmap/dr5/skymaps/9yr/smoothed/wmap_band_smth_iqumap_r9_9yr_K_v5.fits

Thanks to Amazon's Open Data project, these data are free to access from anywhere, and are not subject to cloud data egress costs. NOTE: These data are freely available for your use.