25 Years of Planetary Data Archiving: Lessons Learned the Hard Way

NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS) was established to ensure NASA's return on investment in its planetary space program. The PDS mandate was and is to ensure that the data returned by these missions are not merely preserved, but maintained and usable by subsequent investigators long after the original mission science teams have disbanded. During the intervening generations (1 human, about 5 technological), PDS has amassed a highly diverse archive and dealt with formidable issues of data file format, long-term maintenance, and metadata collection and preservation. Some design choices have stood the test of time; others that seemed obvious contemporarily have been less than satisfactory in the long term. We will present some of the successful and unsuccessful choices made early in PDS history that helped to shape the new PDS4 Archiving Standards.