The Swift Data Center maintains an archive of time-sorted raw telemetry, with duplicates removed, from Swift for the lifetime of the mission. Two types of processing occur on the data. First, Quick-Look data are produced after download from the MOC. Quick-Look will be updated and replaced as new data become available. This will typically result in the same observation being reprocessed several times as new data arrive to fill in any gaps. After each Quick-Look processing the data are made publicly available on the Science Data Center's Quick-Look Facility.
In addition to this processing a final pass of the data through the processing pipeline is done when the observation is complete and all the data are at the Swift Data Center. This run through the pipeline produces the data that are stored in the permanent archive. The final processing run uses the same pipeline and software as the Quick-Look processing does. About one week after the end of an observation, the data are moved from the Quick-Look Facility to the Swift Archive at HEASARC and then removed from the Quick-Look Facility.
The Quick-Look data products are usually available within two hours of the telemetry data arriving at the Swift Data Center. Quick-Look data is provided so that the scientific community has rapid access to preliminary data from the Swift mission. The Quick-Look data products may not be complete and will be reprocessed as new data arrives.