Application Research of FITS Variable-Length Arrays in DAMPE Data Storage

FITS (Flexible Image Transport system) is a data format widely used in space astronomy, and astronomical data files are usually stored in a fixed-length data structure as FITS files. As the first space science satellite in our country, DAMPE (Dark Matter Particle Explorer) satellite's science data source package has the characteristics of variable length. In DAMPE data processing process, it is urgent to design a storage structure and processing method that supports variable length data. In this paper we designed a FITS format that supports variable-length arrays and implemented DAMPE data processing, storage, and management with this data structure. The validation with real data of DAMPE indicated that this method was successfully applied to editing grade products storage of DAMPE, not only significantly reducing the amount of product data, saving storage space, but also improving the speed of data processing.