In recent years, researchers and major research infrastructures in all scientific fields, including astrophysics, have promoted the use of open source software and the adoption of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principle for data to allow users around the world to freely access source code and to support open science globally.
As part of the second national plan for open science, in order to reward research projects and teams that contribute to this major common good and serve as examples for the next generations of researchers and engineers, the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation presented the first "Open Science for Open Source Research" Awards.
Among 129 candidate projects, ten software applications developed by French teams were rewarded for their contribution to the advancement of scientific knowledge. The ceremony of this first edition took place on February 5, 2022 during the Open Science European Conference (OSEC).
Gammapy, a software dedicated to gamma-ray astronomy
Winner among 129 projects in competition, Gammapy is an open-source Python package developed to provide tools for simulation and analysis of the gamma-ray sky at very high and ultra-high energies. It is the software suite chosen as the basis for the official scientific analysis tools of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO). The Gammapy open-source project is the result of an international collaboration, mainly between France and Germany, with strong contributions from Spain and Italy. Like the open-source Astropy project to which we are affiliated, the Gammapy project has a coordination committee (in which APC and LUTH participate) where the main development roadmaps are discussed and validated (https://gammapy.org/team.html).
Thanks to its modular, flexible and readable design, Gammapy is widely used by the gamma-ray community and allows a real interoperability by joint multi-instrument analyses from GeV to TeV. An extension towards multi-messenger analyses (photons and neutrinos of very high energy) is in preparation. Gammapy is gradually becoming a standard tool for our community.
"This award is a wonderful recognition of the quality of the work done over the years by all the developers of Gammapy, as well as the virtuous relationship with the users and the community working behind the scenes on a common data format shared by many gamma-ray experiments", said Bruno Khélifi, scientific leader of the project
A solution chosen by CTAO
In June 2021, Gammapy was selected to be used for scientific analysis of data from the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO).
It will thus be one of the main tools provided by CTAO to the world scientific community for the exploitation of its data. It will serve as an interface to the community and provide a set of software tools of the highest quality, with documentation and tutorials that will enable any user to analyze CTAO data.
In addition, Gammapy will play a critical role in the scientific workflow of CTAO itself, as part of the scientific verification pipelines.