ESA’s Planetary Science Archive: what’s new, and what’s to come

 Introduction

The Planetary Science Archive (PSA) of the European Space Agency hosts all the data from ESA’s planetary missions. It aims to provide a single entry-point for discovering, filtering and using the data, all of which adopt the Planetary Data System (PDS) format.

In 2024 support has been added for data from two ESA-funded instruments on-board the Chang’e 6 and Peregrine-1 spacecraft.

The PSA itself has been updated with several major new features list the last EPSC.

Download manager

The PSA divides data products into two types – the primary observational data, which are the focus of the interface, and secondary (or auxiliary) products, including geometry and calibration data, documentation etc. Taking advantage of the strong links present in PDS4, the new download manager presents the user with several options to find and download these secondary products.

Display of DOI

Each PDS3 dataset and PDS4 collection in PSA are issued with a DOI. To enhance the use of these DOIs, any data products belonging to a dataset with a DOI is now presented in the user interface.

Ingestion of geometry from PDS4 labels

Due to the inhomogeneity of PDS3 geometry information, older missions archiving in PSA used an external tool called to calculate a uniform set of geometric parameters. With PDS4 this information is much more structured. As a result, several PDS4 geometry attributes matching the existing geometry data have been identified and are now automatically ingested into the PSA database, if present in a data product. As a result, they immediately benefit from the extensive geometry filtering in PSA.

In addition, footprints stored in PDS4 meta-data for supported planetary bodies are now automatically extracted and used to populate the corresponding map view, allowing search and retrieval of data by their observational footprints.

Mercury map view

After completing its last Mercury flyby, BepiColombo is on track to reach the innermost planet in late 2026. To prepare for this, the PSA now includes a Mercury map view, offering several basemaps from MESSENGER data, and taking advantage of the ingestion of geometry and footprints as described above.

Quick access to documents

The download manager now allows for users to find instrument and mission documentation for selected products. To make it even easier, the user interface now dynamically displays all such documents for a selected data product and allows them to be opened in the browser.

Integration with ESA Datalabs

ESA Datalabs is a compute platform which runs on ESA premises next to the archive data volumes and thus allows online analysis without downloading the data. A PSA Datalab was already published last year loaded with the key python software libraries used for planetary science. A new addition since then is the publication of the absolute path to each public data product in a new column in the EPN-TAP table. This table, accessible via an API, lets users query the meta-data of public products. The new column allows users in the PSA Datalab to, for example, write a Jupyter notebook that requires no knowledge of the volume and file structure, starting an analysis with a database query using the EPN-TAP API. Example notebooks are now included in the PSA Datalab to demonstrate this.

Future plans

In the coming year, the PSA team plans to give particular attention to the map view and GIS capabilities of the user interface to make them faster and more responsive. Community feedback is critical here and you are invited to contact the PSA team with your use cases so that we can design the best tool for you.