19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Plenary - Data Archiving

Earth Observation Data - ESA's Long-Term Archiving and Access Solution

Gian Maria Pinna
European Space Agency, Italy

The constantly increasing technical capabilities of Earth Observation (EO) satellites, downloading terabytes of data from many different sensors with increasing resolutions, and the high demand by end-users for access to information and services deriving from acquired data, require new storage and access methods and techniques for the EO Archiving Systems.

Also, the old archives from EO missions, with volumes exceeding many PB, and their maintenance to a keep-alive condition, pose additional challenges.

In addition, the present international economic situation calls for a substantial reduction in the coming years of the costs of operating and maintaining the infrastructure used to exploit the missions' data.

Since 2003 the European Space Agency has approved a strategy for the evolution of the several missions ground segments (handled and/or to be developed) into an open multi-mission architecture, which included as main themes:

• Adoption of a common architecture for all missions.
• Decomposition of the facility architecture into functional block elements.
• Harmonization and standardization of interfaces, models and data formats.
• Re-utilization, wherever possible, of already available and tested elements.
• Harmonization of the archives between historical and new missions.

For this purpose, ESA is in process of harmonizing within one coherent frame the common elements of his EO ground facilities as on line archive, order handling, products distribution, local/wide area networks and related applications, with the long term goal of defining an harmonized European infrastructure.

This talk will give an overview of the main problems raised by increasingly demanding requirements of the EO missions and their users from the point of view of the long-term archiving and distribution of the data, highlighting the work done in ESA to satisfy them at affordable costs.