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The diverse and dynamic landscape of services provided by data archives that has recently emerged
is in stark contrast with the classical idea of astronomical archives as static, passive repositories whose
only goal is to capture, record and preserve forever the assets produced by their observatories. In this
new scenario, archives occupy a central role as engines and enablers of the success of the astronomical
facilities they support in multiple ways. More specifically, in the case of mature missions and established observatories
that have collected large amount of data, archives can be considered new instruments in the own right as they, by favoring re-use
and new uses of single or aggregated archival datasets, promote the investigation of regions of the observational
parameter space that can otherwise be impractical to access or inaccessible altogether. In this contribution, I
will describe how the Chandra Data Archive (CDA) contributes to the final science return of the Chandra mission by
focusing on four different areas: maximization of the observational efficiency through contributions to
smooth operations of the observatory; collection and curation of a comprehensive mission bibliography;
assessment of the scientific impact of the mission by the development of specific metrics; promotion of use of
archival data across different astronomical communities. Finally, using the Chandra archive as an example,
I will briefly discuss the changes to the roles and priorities of an astronomical archive that are necessary to
adjust to the evolving needs of the mission and its constituencies.
This work has been supported by NASA under contract NAS 8-03060 to the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory for operation of the Chandra X-ray Center.
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