ESA’s Planetary Science Archive: current status and future plans
- 1European Space Agency, Science Operations Development Division, Madrid, Spain (mark.bentley@esa.int)
- 2Aurora Technology BV for ESA (Camino Bajo del Castillo s/n, 28692 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain)
- 3RHEA for ESA (Camino Bajo del Castillo s/n, 28692 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain)
- 4Telespazio UK Ltd for ESA (Camino Bajo del Castillo s/n, 28692 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain)
- 5Serco for ESA (Camino Bajo del Castillo s/n, 28692 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain)
The European Space Agency’s Planetary Science Archive (PSA) is the home for all scientific data from ESA’s planetary missions. Adopting the NASA PDS standard (version 3 and 4) it is designed to make the data, meta-data and knowledge on how to use them available to the scientific community. As a multi-mission archive, the PSA supports (or will soon support) over ten missions and their associated instruments, with this number expected to grow significantly in the coming years.
The PSA has a long legacy of successfully preserving and distributing mission data to the community, and offers several services to fulfil this, including tabular, image-based and map-based interfaces, several APIs and traditional FTP. However, the entry barrier for new users is quite high, and moving forward there are new data access requirements coming from scientists wanting to perform more complex queries, run machine learning algorithms and so on. This presentation will describe the current infrastructure, recent updates and plans for the next few years which will try to address these changing needs.
In particular, the following key developments are foreseen:
- implementation of a new user interface, with a streamlined and more user-friendly design, which will also work well on mobile, and touchscreen displays,
- improvements to APIs to include more data (specifically instrument geometry), and to incorporate the new PDS API which will allow access to any meta-data in the data products, leveraging the full value of the effort put in by instrument teams and archive scientists to curate them,
- integration with ESA DataLabs, a project designed to “bring the code to the data” and allow data processing and analysis to be done in an interactive online environment hosted close to the data repository and allowing big data workflows without having to download the products,
- publication of data tutorials based on open-source tools and libraries, to give new users a “quick start guide” to using data from a given instrument, and
- a much higher frequency release cadence, responding to the needs of the scientific community in a timely manner.
Finally, community input is sought on other improvements which could be made, and which use cases are not fulfilled by the current infrastructure.
How to cite: Bentley, M., Breitfellner, M., Coia, D., Docasal, R., Heather, D., Grotheer, E., Lim, T., Merín, B., Oliveira, J., Osinde, J., Raga, F., Saiz, J., and Valles, R.: ESA’s Planetary Science Archive: current status and future plans, Europlanet Science Congress 2022, Granada, Spain, 18–23 Sep 2022, EPSC2022-111, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2022-111, 2022.
