User Documentation
The Fornax Initiative is NASA Astrophysics’ cloud-based system that brings together data, software, and computing so that researchers can focus on science.
Fornax is a modern, cloud-native platform for reproducible astronomy, purpose-built to support scientific discovery in the era of petascale data. It is developed through a collaboration between NASA’s science archives; HEASARC, IRSA, and MAST; to transform how astronomers interact with large-scale datasets.
Designed to transform how astronomers interact with large-scale datasets, Fornax addresses four key goals:
- providing robust computing resources,
- broadening scientific opportunity through enhanced access and reproducibility,
- delivering targeted training on data-intensive astronomical research,
- co-locating compute power with the data itself to enable efficient, cloud-native workflows.
To achieve these goals, the Fornax project comprises three integrated components. First is the science console itself, a scalable, cloud-based research environment grounded in open-source tools and infrastructure. Second is a curated ecosystem of interactive notebooks and containerized mission and community software tailored for multi-wavelength and big-data science.
Finally, Fornax offers a suite of advanced NAVO-based data services designed to support rapid, location-independent access to distributed datasets across the NASA archives and beyond.