Archival of Amateur Observations in Support to ESA/Rosetta Mission

The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (CG) has included a global ground-based observing campaign consisting of both professional and amateur observers. While professional observers have access to world class observatories with multi-spectral instruments, amateur observers use smaller aperture telescopes that mainly cover the optical spectrum. Amateur observers however, have the advantage of being able to observe as needed since their time is not competed by other observers as it is in professional facilities. This allows amateurs to create a temporal baseline of observations throughout a mission to complement professional observations with context. The Rosetta mission has had an active amateur observer campaign for over 2 years, from January 2014 to August 2016 and has nearly 150 active observers from around the globe. As the Rosetta mission and its observer campaign come to an end in September 2016, an important goal of the project is the collection and archival of the amateur observational data. The ESA's Planetary Science Archive (PSA) has created a unique system that provides firewalled user-specific directories for amateur observers to upload and archive their data, allowing professionals and amateurs to crowdsource data for future science analyses. Possible future science products could include analysis of luminosity, dust cover, position angle, and tail length, all of which can be analyzed over time due to the consistent amateur data taken for over two years. A challenge for the project is that amateur observers have varying amounts of data, ranging from a few megabytes to several gigabytes. Our project addresses the retrieval of amateur observations, renaming, reformatting, and upload to the PSA. The final steps of the archival of amateur observations are the quality check of the data, some of the possible analyses, and identification of data that can be integrated with professional data analysis. The unique integration of amateur observations and professional observations will be crowdsourced for future scientific analysis. This research project was conducted at NASA/JPL/Caltech with funding from NASA and the NSF REU site Consortium for Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) ran through LACC.