NSSDC Archives Restored Space Physics Data Sets

Over the past five years NASA has provided funds to each of several research groups to restore, better organize and document, and provide enhanced accessibility to several aging space plasma and solar physics data sets judged still to have significant unmined science potential. Most of this work has been done under the auspices of the Space Physics Data System.

NSSDC will be the permanent archive for most of these data sets. A small fraction, primarily involving ground-based magnetometer and other data, will be permanently archived by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Geophysical Data Center.

NSSDC is starting a systematic effort to sweep up these data sets and their supporting material into its permanent archive. Where data are being made network-accessible by the groups funded to restore them, NSSDC will provide primarily the permanent archiving. Where restored data may be too voluminous for the restoring group to maintain on line, NSSDC will provide both permanent archiving and network-accessibility through its NDADS near-line mass storage system.

NSSDC has started this activity with data from the International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE - Lockheed/Martin and UCBerkeley/UWashington instruments), the Dynamics Explorer (DE; RIMS), Scatha, and the Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorer/Ion Release Module (AMPTE/IRM) missions.

Older media transferred to new media available on or near line.

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