The Planetary Plasma Interactions Node of the Planetary Data System

Abstract

Five years ago NASA selected scientists at UCLA to form the Planetary Plasma Interactions (PPI) Node to help the scientific community locate, access and preserve particles and field data from planetary missions. Since planetary plasma data are varied and require expertise in many areas the PPI Node is distributed with an Outer Planets Subnode at the University of Iowa, an Inner Planets Subnode at UCLA and a Radio Astronomy Subnode at GSFC. The PPI Node has tried to serve the science community by providing them with high quality data products. It has worked with missions and individual scientists to secure the highest quality data possible and to thoroughly document it. The PPI Node has validated the data, placed it on long lasting media and made sure it was properly archived for use. So far it has prepared and archived over 10 11 bytes of data and has produced 171 CD-ROMs with peer reviewed data. In so doing an efficient system has been developed to prepare and archive the data and thereby enable to steadily increase the rate at which the data are archived. Although the PPI Node produced a substantial archive during the initial five years, it has an even larger amount of work in progress. This includes preparing CD-ROM data sets with all of the Voyager, Pioneer and Ulysses data at Jupiter and Saturn. It is also completing the Pioneer Venus data restoration. The Galileo Venus archive and radio science data from Magellan will be prepared early in 1995. It is assisting the Small Bodies Node of PDS in the preparation of comet data and with the preparation of data from the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collision with Jupiter. Asteroid data from Gelileo will also be archived. In addition to providing the data, users have been provided with software tools to manage and read the data which are computer, operating system and data format independent. Scalable systems have been developed so that the same software used to manage and access the data for the entire PPI Node can be used by individual investigators to manage the data on a single CD-ROM thereby greatly reducing the software development effort for both the PPI Node and users. This software is delivered with the disks. The PPI Node data holdings are available over the Internet. They can be accessed through the World Wide Web (WWW) at Universal Resource Locator (URL) http://www.igpp.ucla.edu/ssc/pdsppi/Welcome.html. Users without a WWW browser can use the WWW interface by signing into the host “pdsppi.igpp.ucla. edu” as “pdsuser”.