Efforts of the Small Bodies Node in Providing “Analysis Ready Data” to Support Open Science

The Planetary Data System (PDS) provides key structural support for Open Science by meeting the tenants of "Free, unrestricted access¹.” Here we will discuss the need to expand our offerings by improving support for the OS tenants of "Ease of use.”

Analysis-ready data (ARD) provides data in formats that, while different than what was provided by the mission team, are orders of magnitude more useful to scientific researchers. 

For NASA Planetary Science Missions, the data is provided to us in stable and long-term formats that are well documented.  However, the data formats for each mission are typically different.  Additionally, many processing steps are not done by the science team for the archived products, such as ortho-rectification, geospatial positioning, or co-alignment with digital terrain models.  Additionally, there is little consensus within Planetary Science for a standard format for almost any data type, for example images that can be in FITS, VICAR, custom IMG formats, or sometimes JPEG.

PDS nodes have begun to host such ARD as either part of the official archive or outside of the archive using the new PDS annexes².  We have several initiatives to support ARD.  These include the Small Bodies Image Browser and digital terrain models in both ISIS and GeoTiff formats. While generated data in these formats initially requires additional effort, once created they continuously provide value to the data user community.

Analysis-ready data can significantly increase "ease of use" in many different ways.  They typically will be preprocessed, saving data users significant effort that they would have spent learning how to process the data themselves. This preprocessing also lowers the technical barriers and eases the use of complex data sets. In addition to the preprocessing, datasets can be provided in standardized, commonly used data formats that are more useable and accessible than many of the current formats. Streamlining the ARD would greatly ease both researchers' and the public’s ability to use data spanning many different missions in ways that is not currently possible. Focusing on providing the most interoperable and usable data to the community also enables more interdisciplinary collaboration and increases reproducibility — all key goals of Open Science.  

Analysis-ready data in the PDS will be essential to create more open and usable data. As the complexity of planetary mission data increases, ARD can allow the PDS to maximize the scientific return of these valuable datasets.

References:
[1] NASA Science Mission Directorate. (2023). Open-Source Science Guidance, Version 2.1.
[2] Mouginis-Mark, P., Williams, D., Bleacher, J., et al. (2023). Analysis Ready Data (ARD) within the Planetary Data Ecosystem: Benefits for the Science Community. 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.