Data Visualization in the ESA Science Archives and ESA Virtual Observatory

ESA Science Archives and ESA VO Tools are designed to ensure easy handling of mission data for the Scientific Community, allowing customized searches, display of data and related meta-data and download of products. The Archives provide a centralized way to visualize the same data using different ESA or external applications depending on its characteristics. 1. ESA Science Archives The European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) hosts all ESA Astronomy Archives that currently include ISO, XMM-Newton, Integral and in the future Herschel, Planck and Gaia missions (see Arviset et al., 2007). ESAC also hosts the Planetary Science Archive that holds data from Giotto, Mars Express, Rosetta, Huygens and Smart-1, Venus Express, BepiColombo in the future (see Arviset et al., 2006). All ESA Archives use a common modular and flexible architecture that divides the data visualization process in several stages: • First, raw data and scientific products are stored locally in the filesystem following a comprehensive and logical structure. • After that, an ingestion routine is run to extract the needed meta data information from those products and store it in the Archive database. Those meta data are used by the Archive to perform queries in a more efficient way. In the ingestion process sources images are extracted and stored locally too in dedicated folders to make them accesible to the Archive for future display. • Once the database contains the required structure, the user can run the Archive and execute queries using filters and display the related information, icons and postcards using some of the available tools. http://iso.esac.esa.int/ida/ http://xmm.esac.esa.int/xsa/ http://integral.esac.esa.int/isda/ http://www.rssd.esa.int/psa/ 331