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 mission data archived so far include the data from the Dawn mission to the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, the Hayabusa mission to the asteroid Itokawa, Hayabusa2 to the asteroid Ryugu, OSIRIS-REx to asteroid Bennu, and the NEAR mission to the asteroid Eros, as well as others. Archived dust data include those from the LADEE, Cassini, Galileo, Ulysses, and IRAS missions.
Archived asteroid groundbased data includes NEO surveys such as Catalina Sky Survey, Spacewatch, and NEAT, asteroid spectra, lightcurves, polarimetry, and radar data, as well as asteroid family classifications, albedos, proper elements, and many others.
The Asteroid/Dust subnode is leading the archiving for the Psyche mission to the asteroid 16 Psyche, and the Japanese MMX mission to the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, as well as the dust instrument (SUDA) on Europa Clipper.
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.