Cosmic and Heliospheric Data Evaluation Report Completed

The report is prefaced with a summary (available directly on line via the World Wide Web) and includes extensive tabular materials and detailed discussion of the issues weighed and specific examples and recommendations in a variety of cases. A few overall conclusions of the report are as follows:

• The most important C&H missions are Voyagers 1 and 2, Pioneers 10 and 11, Helios 1 and 2, IMP 8, and ISEE 3 (International Cometary Explorer [ICE]). Preservation of data from these missions is the highest archival priority in the C&H discipline. Many specific recommendations with respect to specific data from these missions are included.

• Data from older missions and other data sources have the potential for substantial value but are generally of lesser priority than data from these primary missions above. Specific cases are noted. It is an urgent requirement that current and new missions assign appropriate priority to planning for effective and timely data archiving.

• As the C&H field has unique needs for long-term access to full telemetry-resolution data (highest time resolution, plus, for example, energetic particle pulse heights data or plasma spectral/directional data) for some classes of instruments, the panel advocates feasibility studies and testbed activities to define cost- and benefit-effective archiving approaches for such data.

Members of the Data Evaluation Panel included John F. Cooper (Hughes STX, Greenbelt, Maryland); Paul Gazis (NASA/Ames Research Center, Sunnyvale, California); William S. Kurth (University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa); Alan J. Lazarus (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts); Frank B. McDonald (University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland); Robert E. McGuire (chair, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland); Ralph L. McNutt, Jr. (Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland); K. Roger Pyle (University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois); and Bruce T. Tsurutani (NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California).

The full report may be retrieved electronically (in "rich-text-format " [RTF] or PostScript) from the "SPDS-Related Reports" link from the Space Physics Data System (SPDS) Home Page (World Wide Web URL http://spds.nasa.gov or access via telnet to the "spds" guest account at ncf.gsfc.nasa.gov) or as hard copy by request to the author or NSSDC. It is expected that the SPDS C&H Discipline Coordination Team, headed by Thomas L. Gerrard of Caltech, will oversee updates and extensions to the report over time.

NASA home page

GSFC home page

GSFC organizational page