Welcome to the IPDA

The IPDA's main emphasis is to ease discovery, access and use of planetary data by world-wide scientists regardless of which agency is collecting and distributing the data. Ensuring proper capture, accessibility and availability of the data is the task of the individual space agencies. The IPDA is focusing on developing an international standard which allows the following capabilities: query, access and usage of data across international planetary data archive systems. While, trends in other areas of space science are concentrating on the sharing of science data from diverse standards and collection methods, the IPDA shall concentrate on promoting standards which drive common methods for collecting and describing planetary science data across the international community. Such an approach will better support the long term goal of easing data sharing across system and agency boundaries. An initial starting point for developing such a standard will be internationalization of NASA's Planetary Data System standards.