The Carbon Footprint of Astronomical Research Infrastructures

<strong>Content of the directory</strong> This record contains code and data that were used for the paper <strong>Knoedlseder, J., et al. Estimate of the carbon footprint of astronomical research infrastructures, Nature Astronomy, in press</strong>. <strong>Data</strong> The file <em>ri-carbon-footprint.xls</em> contains all data that were used for the analysis in the paper. The file is an excel file containing the following tabs: Description - a description of the excel file Summary - summary of the findings of the carbon footprint estimates Carbon footprint (ground) - Master table for carbon footprint of ground-based observatories Carbon footprint (space) - Master table for carbon footprint of space missions Emission factors - Collection of emission factors used as input to the study Active infrastructures - List of astronomical facilities that were active worldwide in 2019 Community - Astronomical community and IAU members for several countries (Ahn, S.H., Economic Power, Population, and Size of Astronomical Community, JKAS, 52, 159 (2019). <strong>Code</strong> The record contains three Python scripts. <strong><em>adsquery.py</em></strong> Script to query the ADS database to extract number of publications for a given facility. The script also determines the number of unique authors. It returns global numbers since the start of the mission or observatory operations, and numbers restricted to IRAP. <em><strong>bootstrap.py</strong></em> Script to bootstrap the considered facilities to extrapolate the carbon footprint to all infrastructures that exist worldwide. The script also produces Figure 1 of the paper. <strong><em>carbonintensity.py</em></strong> Script to generate various figures from the excel data, and in particular the carbon intensity Figure 2 of the paper. Running the script requires the "xlrd" Python module that can be installed via conda.