The VISTA Science Archive

We describe the VISTA Science Archive (VSA) and its first public release of data from five of the six VISTA public surveys. The VSA exists to support the VISTA surveys through their lifecycle: the VISTA Public Survey consortia can use it during their quality control assessment of survey data products before submission to the ESO Science Archive Facility (ESO SAF); it supports their exploitation of survey data prior to its publication through the ESO SAF; and, subsequently, it provides the wider community with survey science exploitation tools that complement the data product repository functionality of the ESO SAF.