The Archive for UV Data of Small Bodies
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Planetary Data Archiving, Restoration, and Tools Program
PSI Personnel
Non PSI Personnel: Dennis Bodewits (Co-Investigator, University of Maryland, College Park), Lori Feaga (Co-Investigator, University of Maryland, College Park)
Project Description
Science Goals and Objectives
A variety of important UV datasets on small solar system bodies exist, scattered in disparate locations in varying formats, on computers across the globe. Many of these datasets are simply inaccessible to potentially interested users. In fact, some potentially interested users may not even be aware of the existence of some of these data! We propose to remedy this problem by creating an archive of UV observations (derived products, namely reflectance spectra along with observational geometry) of small bodies – specifically asteroids and Mercury - in the PDS. These data need to be preserved for access and use - in one easy location - by the community, as interest grows in UV spectroscopy and primitive bodies. The UV Asteroid Archive will consist of asteroid data from sources including IUE, HST, Swift, Mariner 9 UVS, Galileo UVS and Rosetta Alice; we will also include groundbased data (UV-visible) from MMT. An additional dataset to be archived is Mercury observations from Mariner 10 UVS, which has never been archived in any format. We anticipate that these data will be useful to the community for compositional studies, to increase spectral coverage for comparison with longer wavelength datasets - as well as for the simple historical reason of documenting the data.
Our goal is to create an archive of UV data, a one-stop shop where even users who don’t normally use UV spectroscopy can relatively easily find asteroid data in usable formats for various applications. The archive will be part of the PDS SBN (except for Mercury data which will be located on the Geosciences Node; but we will include a link to the Mercury data for interested users on the SBN). Some of the datasets (namely, the IUE, Swift, Rosetta and HST observations) have been archived in different locations in their raw form; we propose to include those data as high-level science products (i.e. reflectance spectra along with associated geometry) in this archive.
Methodology.
To establish the UV Asteroid Archive, we propose to restore (as needed), reduce and archive the datasets discussed here. In the future, additional existing or new datasets may be added. We focus on archiving spectroscopic (rather than imaging) measurements. We note that all of the data included here are of good quality and will be usable by the community.