NSSDC Annual Highlights and Statistics for 2001 Available

By Joe King

The annual report on NSSDC's 2001 highlights and statistics has recently been made web accessible at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nssdc/annual/2001/.

This report lists 96 peer-reviewed papers published in 2001 which cite use of NSSDC-provided data or services.  These articles were found mainly by the NSSDC staff perusing the pages of the Journal of Geophysical Research and the Geophysical Research Letters and as such represent a lower limit on the count of 2001 papers benefiting from NSSDC's services.

The report characterizes the nature and size of the NSSDC archive as of the end of 2001 and the data inflow and outflow during 2001.  There were 4,359 distinct data sets from 1,301 experiments flown on 373 different spacecraft.  The 2,318 digital data sets contained 22.5 Terabytes. 

3.5 million files were downloaded from NSSDC during 2001 including 2.9 million from the popular photo gallery.  116 thousand plots and 71 thousand digital files were downloaded from NSSDC's special space physics interfaces, with a significant majority from the CDAWeb interface of the Space Physics Data Facility.  99 thousand executions of geophysical models and 47 thousand plots or lists from NSSDC's orbit information interfaces were also realized in 2002.

NSSDC's web pages averaged over one million hits per month.  919 requests were handled via the mailing of CD-ROMs or photoprints.  In addition, about 8,700 Milky Way and COBE posters were mailed.