About the PDS Asteroid/Dust Subnode
The Asteroid/Dust Subnode of the Planetary Data System is located at the Planetary Science Institute. Along with the Comet Subnode, located at the University of Maryland, it is a part of the Small Bodies Node, a discipline node of PDS. The Asteroid/Dust Subnode is responsible for the archiving of both NASA mission data and groundbased data on asteroids and interplanetary dust.
Asteroid data archived so far include the data from the Dawn mission on the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, the Hayabusa mission to the asteroid Itokawa, the NEAR mission to the asteroid Eros, the IRAS Minor Planet Survey, asteroid spectra, lightcurves, polarimetry, and radar data, as well as asteroid family classifications, albedos, proper elements, and many others. Archived dust data include those from the LADEE, Cassini, Galileo, Ulysses, and IRAS missions.
The Asteroid/Dust subnode is leading the archiving for the sample return mission OSIRIS-REx to the asteroid 101955 Bennu, the Haybusa 2 mission to asteroid 162173 Ryugu, and the Psyche mission to the asteroid 16 Psyche.
Researchers around the world contribute their data to the PDS asteroid and dust data archives, and receive a citable reference for their data set as well as the opportunity to preserve their data for the future and to make them more available to the community. We have developed the On-Line Archiving Facility (OLAF) to make it easier for researchers to archive their data into PDS.