Documenting the Legacy of Cassini's Instrument Teams in NASA's Planetary Data System

In September 2017, the Cassini mission to Saturn concluded its unprecedented thirteen-year exploration of that system with a dramatic end-of-mission impact into the planet. In addition to data collected en route to Saturn, Cassini returned over five terabits of data on the Saturn system collected by its twelve science instruments. This science data, which is available to the planetary science community and the general public via NASA's Planetary Data System archives, represents the legacy left by Cassini for decades to come. Ancillary and engineering data also provide key information that supports the interpretation of Cassini's science data and potentially serve as the basis for other scientific analyses (e.g. Lorenz et al. 2018).

Beyond archived data, the PDS also provides a wealth of information about the missions that collected it. The PDS Atmospheres Node, where the Cassini archive is stored, hosts webpages that contain information about the Cassini project and the science instruments that were onboard Cassini. To enhance the value of this archive, the Cassini Project embarked upon an effort to revamp the pages associated with the Cassini project. The upgraded Cassini mission page contains additional overview material on the project, including resources used by project members during spacecraft operations. Each Cassini mission science discipline has its own page featuring general information pertinent to that discipline, links to reference documents that describe archived data and links to higher order data products.

This poster will focus on the enhanced Cassini PDS webpages for the individual instrument teams. These instrument webpages were designed for consistency among each of the dozen pages and intended to provide users with an introduction to each instrument and its dataset. We will explain how our design principles for these webpages are meant to facilitate access to the PDS Cassini archives for future scientists and propagate Cassini's legacy into the future.

This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. Copyright 2018 California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged.