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

Introduction

The European Space Agency’s Planetary Science Archive (PSA, https://psa.esa.int) is a multi-mission system curating, preserving and serving the data of ESA’s planetary mission. All data are stored in the Planetary Data System (PDS) format and can be searched and retrieved through a unified user interface and APIs. Here we report on the latest updates to PSA functionality and the plans for the coming releases.

Recent updates

A lot of effort in recent months has been invested in preparing for the migration of legacy PDS3 data from Venus Express, Chardrayaan-1, Giotto and SMART-1 to PDS4 format. The data have been converted by adopting the current PDS4 conventions used in PSA, for example migrating all the raw datasets into a single raw data collection. As a part of this process the dataset and product names have changed. The PSA has been updated to allow search for both the old and new identifiers. Documentation is being prepared to explain to users of the new data how the PDS3 keywords described in the PI-team provided documents are mapped to PDS4. The original PDS3 legacy datasets will be maintained on the PSA FTP.

PSA separates data into two categories – primary observational data, and ancillary data to support this (browse images, calibration and geometry data etc.). Previously, API access to these data required knowing which category a product belonged to. A simplified API has now been released which allowed data to be retrieved by LID or LIDVID, regardless of its type.

A long-awaited feature released in PSA 7.9.0 is the ability to share or bookmark a permalink which restores almost all facets of a PSA search. This means that users can share a URL which encodes the current view and all filters, including for example the instrument, time range, map view region of interest etc.

On the user interface front, both the map and gallery views have received updates. The map view is now more performant for multi-mission and multi-instrument searches, displaying the results for each instrument in a separate GIS layer, whilst the gallery view supports “infinite scroll”, pre-loading (and down-sampling) images as the user moves down the page.

Finally, a new download mechanism has been introduced. Instead of packaging data into a zip or similar this provides the user a python or bash script which requests files individually from the archive. This allows for download of much larger data volumes without the delays associated with compressing the file.

Future plans

User interface improvements are a major goal for the next few PSA releases. Further refinements are planned to the map view, improving the way users perform initial searches by using coarse product counts to prompt the user to refine their search until a sensible number of footprints are displayed. A number of small usability enhancements are also planned (e.g. shift-click for range select in both the table and gallery views).

The PSA has re-started work this year on the Rosalind Franklin Mission (RFM) archive. As well as the standard ingestion and retrieval functions, dedicated views will be provided to show the rover traverse over the Martian surface, allowing users to find images and sample analyses along the route. With the arrival of BepiColombo at Mercury, a flood of data are expected, populating the Mercury map view and preparing for the first Mercury orbit data release next year. Finally, PSA will start supporting archiving of laboratory data of relevance to planetary science, in the context of Mars analogue samples.

As always, user feedback is critical to the continued development of the PSA and the science community is invited to let us know what does and (more importantly) doesn’t work for you!