THE PLANETARY PLASMA INTERACTIONS NODE OF THE PLANETARY DATA SYSTEM

Five years ago NASA selected scientists at UCLA to form the Planetary Plasma Interactions (PPI) Node to help the scientific community locate , access and preserve particles and field data from planetary missions . Since planetary plasma data are varied and require expertise in many areas the PPI Node is distributed with an Outer Planets Subnode at th e University of Iowa, an Inner Planets Subnode at UCLA and a Radio Ast ronomy Subnode at GSFC. The PPI Node has tried to serve the science co mmunity by providing them with high quality data products. It has work ed with missions and individual scientists to secure the highest quali ty data possible and to thoroughly document it. The PPI Node has valid ated the data, placed it on long lasting media and made sure it was pr operly archived for use. So far it has prepared and archived over 10(1 1) bytes of data and has produced 171 CD-ROMs with peer reviewed data. In so doing an efficient system has been developed to prepare and arc hive the data and thereby enable to steadily increase the rate at whic h the data are archived. Although the PPI Node produced a substantial archive during the initial five years, it has an even larger amount of work in progress. This includes preparing CD-ROM data sets with all o f the Voyager, Pioneer and Ulysses data at Jupiter and Saturn. It is a lso completing the Pioneer Venus data restoration. The Galileo Venus a rchive and radio science data from Magellan will be prepared early in 1995. It is assisting the Small Bodies Node of PDS in the preparation of comet data and with the preparation of data from the comet Shoemake r-Levy 9 collision with Jupiter. Asteroid data from Galileo will also be archived. In addition to providing the data, users have been provid ed with software tools to manage and read the data which are computer, operating system and data format independent. Scalable systems have b een developed so that the same software used to manage and access the data for the entire PPI Node can be used by individual investigators t o manage the data on a single CD-ROM thereby greatly reducing the soft ware development effort for both the PPI Node and users. This software is delivered with the disks. The PPI Node data holdings are available over the Internet. hey can be accessed through the World Wide Web (WW W) at Universal Resource Locator (URL) http ://www.igpp.ucla.edu/ssc/p dsppi/Welcome.html. Users without a WWW browser can use the WWW interf ace by signing into the host ''pdsppi.igpp.ucla.edu'' as ''pdsuser''.