Commensal Radio Astronomy FasT survey (CRAFTS) data sets

Having achieved ‘first-light’ right before the opening ceremony on September 25, 2016, the Fivehundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is being busily commissioned.We have devised a survey plan to utilized the full sensitivity of FAST, while minimizing the complexities in operation the system. The 19-beam L band focal plan array will be rotated to specific angles and taking continuous data streams while the surface shape and the focal cabin stay fixed. Such a survey will cover the northern sky in about 220 full days. Our aim is to obtain data for pulsar search, HI (neutral hydrogen) galaxies, HI imaging, and radio transients, simultaneously, through multiple backends. These data sets could be a significant contribution to all related fields in radio astronomy and remain relevant for decades.CRAFTS uses at least four backends for pulsars, HI galaxies, HI imaging, and fast radio bursts (FRB). A possible fifth search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (SETI) spectrometer is being discussed. The sampling rate of pulsars is 100 milliseconds. For HI observations, the sampling rate is 1 second. The FRB backend has a real-time triggering mechanism, which saves baseband data in a one-minute ring buffer when triggered.CRAFTS expects to discover more than a thousand pulsars, close to 200 of which will be MSPs, detect hundreds of thousands HI galaxies, obtain 10 billion voxels in HI images, and discover a few 10s of FRBs. The data rate, calibration, scan design, etc. of CRAFTS pose significant challenges. The commensality has long been desired, but remains unprecedented. Combined with the also unprecedented sensitivity of FAST, such a commensal survey should make fundamental contribution to studies of pulsars, galaxies, ISM, and transients and foster potential breakthroughs.The latest and most comprehensive information on the project can be found at the following links：http://groups.bao.ac.cn/ism/CRAFTS/You are welcome to download the data and use it. Please indicate the doi information of the data and quote the paper at the same time: 10.1109/MMM.2018.2802178Note: Currently ds9, and some versions of astropy may return incorrect values for the sky coordinates in the cubes. Aladin, cfitsio, newer versions of astropy, and Karma do return the correct coordinates.