ESA Science Archives and associated VO activities
Abstract
ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC), near Madrid, Spain, hosts most of ESA space based missions' scientific archives, in planetary (Mars Express, Venus Express, Rosetta, Huygens, Giotto, Smart-1, all in ESA Planetary Science Archive), in astronomy (XMM-Newton, Herschel, ISO, Integral, Exosat, Planck) and in solar physics (Soho). All these science archives are operated by a dedicated Science Archives and Virtual Observatory Team (SAT) at ESAC, enabling common and efficient design, development, operations and maintenance of the archives software systems. This also ensures long term preservation and availability of such science archives, as a sustainable service to the science community. ESA space science data can be accessed through powerful and user friendly user interface, as well as from machine scriptable interface and through VO interfaces. Virtual Observatory activities are also fully part of ESA archiving strategy and ESA is a very ac-tive partner in VO initiatives in Europe through Euro-VO AIDA and EuroPlanet and worldwide through the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) and the IPDA (International Planetary Data Alliance).
- Publication:
-
38th COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010cosp...38..798A