Welcome to the Timeseries Integrated Knowledge Engine (TIKE)

TIKE is a JupyterHub service provided by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and its main goal is to increase the accessibility of scientific data and software related to the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST).

Why should I use TIKE?

If you access and analyze data from MAST, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, using TIKE can be incredibly convenient. The primary advantages are:

1. The cloud environment offers quick access to all the data in MAST's AWS Public Datasets; no need to wait for a download to complete.
2. As data volume from missions continues to grow, it will not be practical to store files of interest on your local machine. As an example, TESS now produces about 7 TB of calibrated images every 27 days. Future missions, like the Roman Space Telescope will produce equally large files.
3. Works “out-of-the-box”: installation is not required. TIKE includes many common packages relevant to the hosted missions; this includes generic packages like pandas and numpy, in addition to astronomy-specific ones like astroquery and lightkurve.

What data are available on TIKE?

Any data hosted in MAST's AWS Public Datasets are available on TIKE. Our initial focus is on time series data, such as those available from the TESS, Kepler, and K2 missions. Data from Hubble and GALEX are also available. We're working hard to make more missions available on the cloud, so stay tuned.

Getting Started with TIKE

To use the Science Platforms, you need a MyST account. If you do not have a MyST account, go to the MyST account page, click on Create to request an account. Once you have your account, click the Launch button in the Registered Users panel to set properties and preferences for your account. You will then be able to “Sign in with MyST” below.

Additional information

• Compute power is limited but comparable to a modern laptop. Four cores are available to enable multi-processing.
• TIKE is continually maintained and updated, and as such, there may be regular changes and downtime.
• Data on TIKE is saved to AWS and backed up by STScI every two weeks. Even so, you should periodically back up any essential files.
• TIKE is free to use, and users do not require an AWS account to use TIKE or to access STScI's Public Datasets in AWS.
• Several resources are available to support TIKE usage, and we expect more to be added in the coming months. At this time, sources include the TIKE_content Github repository, a copy of which is provided in each user's home directory.
• Your data is private and will not be shared with other scientists. However, storage and compute usage are monitored. Using TIKE for nefarious purposes will result in your access being restricted so that we can provide an acceptable level of service to all users.

Recent Changes

• Removed deprecated environment AAS 243 Workshop tike-0.10.1 (May 4, 2023)
• Automatically updated repos now reside in the $HOME/references directory, see SYNC-INSTRUCTIONS.md for more information.
• The kernel-xxx scripts in /opt/tools have been overhauled with an important bugfix. These are intended to support user installed persistent conda environents and corresponding JupyterLab kernels.