DARTS of the Month

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DARTS Lunar and Planetary Science

Fig 1: DARTS "Lunar and Planetary Science" will be coming soon.

DARTS is utilized widely among a number of scientists as a data archive of space science satellites. However, it had no category of "lunar and planetary science" which covers asteroids, major planets, and the moon. Since Japan had been at the dawn of a new age of interplanetary probe so that the data we could provide was much less than other fields.

In these past 10 years, it has started to obtain science data from the asteroid probe "Hayabusa" and the lunar orbiter "Kaguya". Additionally, we have a plan to launch of "Planet-C" (Venus Climate Orbiter) and "BepiColombo" (Mercury Climate Orbiter). Both are expected to provide us plenty of valuable data. Based on this background, we must prepare disciplined data archive. Currently there is only "Hayabusa" category, but in future, all data related to lunar and planetary science will try to be accessible from DARTS.

Fig 2 (left): HAYABUSA Top Page
Fig 3 (Right): HAYABUSA AMICA Shape Model Data.

Recently International Planetary Data Alliance (IPDA) was established to examine the standardization of data sharing between Planetary Data System (PDS) in NASA and Planetary Science Archive (PSA) in ESA. Not only NASA and PSA, today all major agencies join to develop guidelines.

As an example, they are developing Planetary Data Access Protocol (PDAP). PDAP is defined as the internet protocol. When users access PDAP server as an URL query, they can search data easily with PDAP browser or any other tools. Also, as one of the IPDA activity, JAXA developed PDAP server of "Hayabusa" to build up DARTS lunar planet science category.

Actually DARTS lunar and planetary science field has developed late, we would build up much better data archives with the precious achievement of our predecessors.

Yukio Yamamoto (ISAS/JAXA)

May 2009