Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
NASA offers its planetary data archive as the template for 71 Artemis Accords signatories
Two virtual sessions six weeks apart, ending Sept. 8, handed signatories NASA's Planetary Data System and its metadata standard as a working model for the lunar data frameworks they build themselves.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- NASA ran a two-part virtual workshop series that began July 28 and concluded Sept. 8, built around the Artemis Accords tenet calling for timely release of scientific data to the public and international scientists.
- The sessions followed discussions ISRO led in May, when signatories first explored ways to advance open data practices among themselves.
- NASA states the commitment as sharing the science from every Moon rock sample, lunar dataset and discovery produced through Artemis with the global scientific community.
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Why it matters
- capability Partner agencies now have a specific archive standard to copy, so the alignment work that makes cross-agency lunar datasets queryable together can start before any Artemis sample comes back.
- constraint The tenet obliges signatories to release data in timely fashion, and NASA has not said how soon that is. A research group cannot plan a project schedule around when Artemis results appear.
- decision Each of the 63 nations that signed after 2020 has to choose between building to NASA's information model and building its own, and that choice decides whether its lunar data is usable next to NASA's.
- precedent Three signatory meetings on open data in about four months, one of them hosted by ISRO, sets an expectation that archive practice gets negotiated by technical staff across agencies.
At the second session, NASA presented the Planetary Data System, one of its primary archives for planetary science data, along with openly available lunar data, visualization and analysis tools, and the system's data information model standard [5]. The agency described that session as giving signatories a working model to reference as they build or refine their own data-sharing frameworks [6].
Two agencies can both publish open lunar data and still leave a researcher unable to query the archives together, if each describes its instruments, coordinates and calibration in its own vocabulary.
Andrew Mitchell, deputy chief science data officer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said the workshops "gave our Artemis Accords partners practical tools and a shared foundation to build on as we move forward together" [8]. He also said: "Advances in technology help enable open science, but technology alone is insufficient" [7].
The tenet under discussion is the timely release of scientific data to the public and the international scientific community [3]. NASA did not say how soon that means, or when Artemis samples come back. A laboratory planning work around the first Artemis samples has no date to schedule against.
The commitment as NASA states it covers the science from every Moon rock sample, lunar dataset and discovery produced through the program [1]. A rock, though, is allocated to a laboratory, and the results appear when that laboratory publishes. Jacob Bleacher, NASA's chief exploration scientist, said the agency is "making data, tools, and results freely available, and inviting the Artemis Accords partners to innovate with us and share their data as well" [9].
NASA and the State Department joined seven other founding nations to set up the Accords in 2020 [10]. That makes eight founding nations, and with 71 signatories now, 63 have joined since [11]. NASA says all 71 uphold the data-sharing commitment [2].
The first of the two recent sessions covered open science principles and implementation practices, which NASA says promoted interoperability among signatories and advanced reproducibility, accessibility and transparency [15]. The agency split the follow-on discussion into two virtual meetings so technical experts around the world could take part [12]. Enabling access to scientific data was one of five commitments the founding nations set down in 2020 [14].
What to watch
- Whether any signatory publishes a data-sharing framework built on NASA's data information model standard.
- Whether NASA attaches a stated latency to the release of Artemis sample results and mission datasets.
- Whether the workshop series continues past Sept. 8, and which agency hosts the next one after ISRO and NASA.