| Quick-Start Introduction to PDS Archiving |
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Consulting Resources at the SBN
The SBN has been part of the
Planetary Data System since 1989. We've conducted numerous data reviews,
have assisted in
the final preparation of the International Halley Watch CD-ROM Archive,
produced a series of CD volumes documenting the collision of comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter, lead
the NEAR Earth Asterod Rendezvous (NEAR) mission archiving effort, and
have worked on the restoration of several large data sets, including the
Giotto Extended Mission to comet Grigg-Skjellerup and sections of the
NEAR delivery that have proved particularly intractable to end users.
Upcoming projects include the Deep Impact, New Horizons and
CONTOUR missions, as well as the Rosetta mission archive, in
conjunction with the European Space Agency.
Our archives include a large number of ground-based datasets containing
cataloged properties of asteroids and comets, as well as laboratory
spectra of meteorite samples, the Pluto-Charon mutual events database,
and other essential reference data for the study of asteroids, comets
and interplanetary dust.
For data preparers and reviewers we can provide:
- an introduction to the PDS system;
- advice on formatting and documenting data to ease the process of
creating the final archive product;
- specific models of PDS-formatted data sets and the ancillary information
required by PDS for the archive, plus guidance on creating the necessary
labels and support files;
- Unix and C tools for working with PDS data sets, including formatting
routines; and
- Collateral FITS and IDL expertise.
In addition to the PDS system, our personnel have extensive
experience with FITS
format and converting between FITS and PDS labelled files. The node also
played
a pivotal communications role in the coordination of observations of the
impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter, in July of 1994, and we would
be happy to discuss any and all lessons learned during this encounter.
For assistance please contact Anne Raugh by phone at (301) 405-6855 or
by email as raugh at astro.umd.edu.
SBN Local Tools
At the SBN we've generated a suite of tools for formatting, verifying and
labelling PDS data files. This is a very informal, incidental, yet
on-going development
effort, so the contents of the library tend to be a bit fluid and there is
no formal release schedule or version numbering. Most of the tools are
written in Perl, the rest are either C or Unix shell scripts and were developed
to address specific data processing problems encountered with SBN data sets.
Descriptions, source code and man documentation pages for all routines
are available through the
SBN Software
Archive page.
These routines include:
- Table verifiers, for ASCII or binary PDS TABLES, which check
the contents of data files and compare them against the label values.
These verifiers include checks against extrema for both types of
tables, and format checks for ASCII tables. Sanity checking is also
performed on file parameters (like ROWS) in the label.
- File formatting utilities, including routines to concatenate
files, split them horizontally or vertically, add and delete columns,
add and remove record delimiters, and convert between variable and
fixed-length ASCII records.
- FITS handling utilities, for splitting and joining FITS headers
and data, converting the non-delimited FITS header records into
more convenient formats, and padding FITS file segments out with the
appropriate type of character (blank or null).
- FITS header converter, to convert entire FITS headers into
PDS labels for the most common data structures.
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