ESAC Science Exploitation and Preservation Platform Reference Architecture

At ESA, active science missions like Gaia, Planck and XMM-Newton have developed precursor systems enabling the provision of advanced applications for the execution and instantiation of data analysis pipelines. Simultaneously, developments in missions like Euclid, as well as programmes like Galileo and Copernicus are tackling the creation of cyberinfrastructures capable of acquiring, processing, distributing and analysing massive amounts of data in an effective way. These initiatives have led to the implementation of solutions, commonly known as Thematic Exploitation Platforms.

ESAC Science Exploitation and Preservation Platform (SEPP) project drives the consolidation of past experiences and future needs into a reference framework to foster research through the provision of space science data, products and services. SEPP aims at integrating information and processing assets into a single environment to deliver advanced analysis and collaboration services.

This work presents SEPP's multi-mission reference architecture, which leverages on mainstream big data, cloud, virtualisation and container technologies to create a software as a service (SaaS) computing environment. This environment pivots around the paradigm shift characterised by the move of processing components to the data, rather than the move of data to the users.