PSA Support to Users

The PSA provides direct support to all users throughout the full archiving process.  This includes full support to our science end users and to our data providers from the initiation of an archive set up for a mission through to its final 'legacy' content for long-term scientific use. 

The following summarises some of the support provided by our personnel.  Should you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us, or refer to our Resources and FAQ pages for further information.

Support to the Science Community

The data users can query the data products and data sets through various user interfaces supported on nearly all available computer platforms. Support is provided to end users to cover all aspects of data retrieval and usage:

  • PSA Scientific Advisory Group
    • Group of planetary scientist experts that offer advice on ways to improve the services provided by the PSA, see the PSA-UG page.
    • Help desk: if you have any queries about the PSA you can contact us directly.
  • Data Query and Retrieval
  • PDS Standard Support
  • Co-ordination and chair for Peer Reviews 
  • Design, Production and Delivery of ancillary data
  • SPICE conversion
  • Software consultancy and support
  • Science planning information, long-term archive preparation

Support to the Data Producers

The PSA provides expert consultancy to the individual data producers throughout the archiving process as well as support for many archiving related activities:

  • Data Archive Workshops (organised on request)
    • These are workshops supported by instrument teams to provide expert advice on the use of their data. See the Data Workshops page for further details.
  • SPICE Workshops (organised on request)
    • Usually one per year, supporting the use of SPICE and ancillary data with archived instrument data. See the Ancillary Data and the Data Workshops pages for further details.
  • PDS Standard Support
  • Coordination of Mission Data Archive Working Groups (DAWG)
  • Co-ordination and chair for Peer Reviews
  • Dataset support tools (see Tools page)
  • Dataset validation and ingestion
    • The PSA Volume Verification Tool (PVV)
    • Can verify the structure of the whole data set
    • Can verify the content of the ODL language
    • Can verify the references, catalogue structure, etc
  • Database construction and maintenance