I'm going to be talking tomorrow with the manager of ESA's Planetary Science Archive (equivalent to NASA's PDS), asking questions about what it is, how it's supposed to work, how it gets funded, what mandates missions have to provide data to it, in what forms and at what processing levels, etc. etc. I thought I'd offer others here the chance to suggest any burning questions you might have with regards to the PSA that I could ask him.

--Emily

Well - most of these are just me wanting to shout at the HRSC scientists....but some might be appropriate. You have a knack of wording things somewhat more appropriately than I

- Can we not just have an FTP server of the data like the PDS so one can just go and grab it instead of ploughing through an awkward JAVA interface that's buggy as hell ( I can see where they're going, but it's currently dreadfull to use, the map method being utterly broken)

- For the love of god zip up the .img's...They could save 50% + of their bandwidth if they had .gz versions of the files...some are >200mb...they're nuts not to do so.

- We need more supporting processing information. The MER Workbook is a haven of large, detailed PDF's telling us exactly how to read the data, specifics regarding IMG headers etc...we need this information for ESA instrumentation as well.

- Map projected HRSC images of the R, G, B, IR and ND channels are available, but not the stereo channels. Any reason?

and this one's actually paraphrased from one I spotted from JB in the first MSL landing meeting write up...
Are the HRSC Dem's going to make it into the public domain? If not...why not. Seems like a fairly fundamental data set from a High Resolution Stereo Camera

Hope it's a constuctive chat!

Doug

Emily:

Doug's being far too diplomatic.

Please take the opportunity to express the profound frustration and disenchantment which I feel with regard to the ESA glacially slow data releases as compared to the US practice. SMART-1 has taken thousands and thousands of images, for example, of which only a couple of hundred have escaped into the wild (and three-quarters of that total figure for images were in *one* full-orbit movie!). ESA has performed sterling work, probably, but as one of the taxpayers who funds their efforts I feel distinctly short-changed.

I'm sure I'm not alone in these views.

Bob Shaw

How can I count the ways?

The Huygens data should be released this month. I am hoping to:

1) Be able to read the radar altitude Vrs time - none of the plots released to date have segregated the radar from the time-at-altitude data. Also the time axis have been 'floating', not directly attached to the radar, or relative time rather than plotted in mission or Universal time. (I can't specifically correlate the radar with other data, and I have not seen radar plots associated with the landing time.)

2) Acoustic altitude Vrs time.

3) What progress there is on the VLA triangulation, and how does it compare with the estimated descent with free parameters?

4) Will we be able to look up the housekeeping data? - I would especially like to compare the radar with the time-at-altitude data.

5) As near as I can tell, there are no time stamps, and no definite order in the DISR images - is this true, or will there be an index in the data set?

6) The permittivity data is exceptionally puzzling, showing no change in permittivity when the probe pierce the 'soil' {that is a physical impossibility}, but changing several minutes after the landing. Is the time stamping on this data reliable? How much confidence is there in the reliability of the probe?

Finally,

I have argued that since when the probe first responded within seconds of the expected time, but the Doppler shift was ~35m/s greater-than-expected and continued to rise; that it is difficult to imagine how the probe followed the expected time-at-altitude table so closely, and still managed to land 14 minutes late. Are they absolutely certain that there was not some systemic failure, and the landing 'time' was actually the 'fail-safe' time out (which according to documentation, was ~ 15 minutes after the expected landing.)

Thanks Emily

Edited to add:

If there are funding issues for archiving and publishing data, can we help?

I would echo what Bob said. The ESA has done a very poor job of putting images and data into the public domain.

Huygens, Smart 1, hell...ENVISAT...data should be going online for all of these...and frankly, should have done so some time ago.

Doug

Do truely raw versions of the Giotto Halley images exist?

Images distributed in the Halley archive CD rom set have been geometrically resampled, which totally trashed the usability of the multispectral close encounter images (which were 2x subsampled for transmission).

There is Giotto stuff at the PSA, but because it's stuck behind this Java interface it's awkward and clunky to actually get (best ever mission data delivery is Deep Impact and Stardust via the small body PDS node. Zip's of data day by day...perfect )

However, once youv'e drawn digital blood in getting there, there does seem to be 2000ish Giotto Halley Multicolour Camera images - concluding with data that I recognise as the fairly often seen close appr. imagery

Doug

Unfortunately he wasn't at his desk when I tried to call yesterday (caught in a meeting about Venus Express, he apologized) and is now going on vacation for several weeks (you crazy Europeans and your long summer vacations!). He told me the name of someone else I can try calling next week. So I'll try making contact then. I've got several of your questions written down, in ...er... more diplomatic style.

--Emily

Emily:

Oh, go on. Let 'em have it with both barrels!

Go on, go on, go on. Go on. Go on...

Bob Shaw

I suspect that the reason the Huygens data release - originally scheduled for June, was pushed back to July, is because they knew everyone in Europe would be on vacation until at least the end of La Toure, so now they can wait unit August...

...which is ok with me, because I would rather be following la tour

A quote from the SMART-1 ESA web page:

'12 July 2006 During its 15-month science mission at the Moon, ESA's SMART-1 returned up to 1000 images per week, whose analysis is still keeping the scientists busy. They show the Moon’s surface in unprecedented detail (with the kind of information that until now, scientists could only dream about) and it is going to get better.'

- Fifteen months in orbit

- means 65 weeks in orbit

- Up to 1,000 images per week

- means 65,000 images (maximum)

- 200 have been published

- That's 0.3% of the total

- And three quarters of that 0.3% were in one movie animation.

Sigh


Bob Shaw

I'm curious about both Huygens and SMART-1 image archiving plans too. That's definitely on my list to ask. I hate to admit it but though I've heretofore been an early riser, I haven't yet managed to pull my carcass out of bed in time (before 7 am my time) to become sentient in time to call Noordwijk. --Emily