Welcome to part 2 of our “Meet MAST series”. Check out part 1.This interview is with…

Brian Erickson - Principal Software Engineer

I have been working as a user experience designer for close to 15 years. In that time I have worked with a lot of developers. Brian is top notch. When I hand him a design, he delivers! His attention to detail and polish is unmatched. We often sit down and live-code CSS until it looks just right. He is truly a craftsman!

Here’s an example to illustrate Brian’s commitment to getting the job done right. Brian is the attentive... read more

I remember how little I knew about MAST when I was preparing for my job interview. STScI is a highly respected institution, and I was inspired by MAST’s mission to make data from more than twenty space missions available to everyone. The opportunity to work at such a renowned place was incredibly attractive.

At the same time, I had never used MAST data in my own research, and I did not know much about space telescopes. MAST felt like a black box to me. I tried to imagine what people at MAST actually did and how everything worked behind... read more

Welcome to “MAST Wrapped 2025”! This post will present some highlights and statistics from this year at MAST.

Chapter 1: Data

Total Number of Files in MAST

This year, MAST surpassed 1 BILLION FILES! This covers over 356,276,560 unique observations from 96 different telescopes - both in space (like HST and JWST) and on the Earth.

New Data Added

MAST is growing VERY quickly: of those 1 billion files, 266 million of them were added in 2025! That’s over... read more