The Rosetta Science Archive: Closing Out the Science Content

On 30 September 2016, Rosetta completed its mission by landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Although this marked an end to the spacecraft’s operations, intensive work has continued for several years, with the instrument teams updating their data in response to scientific reviews and delivering them to ESA’s Planetary Science Archive (PSA). ESA has also been working with the instrument teams to produce new and enhanced data, and to improve documentation, aiming to provide the best long-term archive possible for the Rosetta mission.

All teams have now completed their nominal science data deliveries from the comet phase, and samples of final data from the enhanced archiving activities went through a last science review in September 2019. The aim is to to complete any updates requested and deliver final products in the first half of 2020.

As soon as Rosetta’s operational mission ended, ESA established a number of activities with the Rosetta instrument teams to allow them to continue working on enhancing their archive content. The updates were focused on key aspects of an instrument’s calibration or the production of higher level data / information, and were therefore specific to each instrument. Most activities are now complete, but a few are still in the process of being closed in early 2020.

Almost all instrument teams have now provided a Science User Guide for their data, which have been highly appreciated by the scientists in the recent reviews. Many teams have also updated their calibrations to deliver higher level and/or derived products. For example, OSIRIS have delivered data with improved calibrations, as well as straylight corrected, I/F corrected, and three-dimensional georeferenced products. These are all already available in the archive. They now also provide their data additionally in FITS format, and have added quicklook (browse) versions of their products to allow an end-user to more easily identify the images they may be interested in. Internal straylight data and boresight corrected / full frame data are currently in preparation and will be added to the archive early this year.

Similarly, the VIRTIS team will update both their spectral and geometrical calibrations, and deliver mapping products to the final archive. The Rosetta Plasma Consortium instruments completed several cross-calibrations and a number of activities individual to each instrument, as well as producing illumination maps of the comet. The MIDAS team have produced a dust particle catalog from the comet coma. GIADA have produced dust environment maps with omni-directional products. COSIMA has delivered laboratory data to help understand their inflight measurements. An activity is also ongoing to produce data set(s) containing supporting ground-based observations of the comet.

The Rosetta ESA archiving team are also producing calibrated data for the NAVCAM instrument, and will include the latest shape models from the comet in the final Rosetta archive. Work is also underway to incorporate the radiation monitor (SREM) and spacecraft housekeeping (MUST) data into the archive.

This presentation will outline the current status of the Rosetta archive, and highlight the work being done this year to close out the archive and prepare it for legacy use.