ESA’s Planetary Science Archive, updates since last year!

Abstract

With new missions being selected, missions moving to post-operations, and missions starting their journey to various targets in the Solar System, the European Space Agency’s Planetary Science Archive [1] (http://psa.esa.int) (PSA) is in constant evolution to support the needs of the projects and of the scientific community.

What happened since last year?

The past year has been good for the European Space Agency (ESA) Solar System missions and the PSA, with the successful flyby of Earth by the BepiColombo mission to Mercury. The ExoMars 2016 mission is performing nominally and is quickly delivering numerous scientific observations. As is common for ESA missions, access to the data is protected and reserved to members of the science team for the first months of the mission. Once the products are ready to go public, the PSA performs a scientific peer-review to ensure that the products to be made public are of excellent quality for all future users.

During the first half of 2020, the PSA has successfully peer-reviewed the CaSSIS and NOMAD observations. Those products are now being made public on a systematic basis once the proprietary period elapses (generally between 6 and 12 months).

Early in 2020, filters to search data with geometrical values (i.e., longitude, phase angle, slant distance, etc.) were enabled. For now this service works for Mars Express and Rosetta, but will be soon extended to other missions.

One of the main new services provided to the scientific community in 2020 is the Guest Storage Facility (GSF), which allows users to archive derived products. Products such as geological maps, Digital Terrains Models, new calibrated files, and others can be stored in the GSF in the format most used by the users. Contact us to preserve your science!

Finally, by the end of 2020 users of the PSA will have access to new services based on Geographical Information Systems.

You can contribute to the PSA!

At the PSA we constantly interact with our users to ensure that our services are in line with the expectations and needs of the community. We encourage feedback from community scientists through:

• PSA Users Group: A group of scientific experts advising the PSA on strategic development;
• Direct interactions: Scientists from the PSA are available and eager to receive your comments and suggestions;
• ESA missions: If you are part of a mission archiving its data at the PSA, tell us how your data should best be searched and used.

Acknowledgement

The authors are very grateful to all the people who have contributed over the last 17 years to ESA's Planetary Science Archive. We are also thankful to ESA’s teams who are operating the missions and to the instrument science teams who are generating and delivering scientific calibrated products to the archive.

References

[1] Besse, S. et al. (2017) Planetary and Space Science, 10.1016/j.pss.2017.07.013, ESA's Planetary Science Archive: Preserve and present reliable scientific data sets.