Speaker
Description
The ESAC Science Data Center (ESDC) develops and operates the science archives for ESA missions, providing the scientific community with access to all ESA Planetary, Heliophysics, and Astronomy science data collections. Many of these archives are now approaching the legacy phase, as active missions decline and new ones typically allocate smaller budgets for archiving. ESDC is in fact approaching a turning point where legacy missions will overtake active ones, making it necessary to streamline archive development, operations, and maintenance.
Operating multiple independent archives is resource-intensive, leading to challenges such as software obsolescence, lack of standardization, reduced interoperability, loss of institutional knowledge, and fragmented archive evolution. To address these issues and ensure the long-term preservation and usability of scientific data, we propose the integration of stand-alone mission archives into a unified, scalable backend system: The ESDC Multi-Mission Data Services (EMDS).
The EMDS will enable cross-disciplinary, unified data access by implementing standardized interoperability mechanisms, such as the IVOA Table Access Protocol (TAP), and harmonizing interfaces across scientific domains. This strategy enhances scalability, maintainability, and usability, becoming the de facto standard for new missions (e.g., SMILE, Einstein Probe or Proba-3) while supporting the migration of existing archives, ensuring their data is accessible and preserved for long-term scientific use. Additionally, EMDS infrastructure will support the development of common user interfaces, such as the recently released HelioPhysics Archive (HPA). This poster outlines the vision, architecture, challenges, and implementation strategy for evolving ESA's science archives into a single, cohesive and scalable system.
| Affiliation of the submitter | STARION for ESA |
|---|---|
| Attendance | in-person |
