Preserving History…About Earth and Beyond

Listen in to Learn:

• How to capture data in context that that makes it meaningful

• How to safely store data in an easily-retrievable format

• How to build a robust data backup system

• How space exploration is moving toward data-driven discovery

Collecting and Storing Scientific Data Is Keeping Astronauts In Space

What’s the most valuable data you store in the cloud? For most of us, it’s pictures of family and friends. These photos are priceless to each individual, certainly. It’s definitely worth storing a backup in the cloud and having them on a local disk.

Now imagine your data was priceless not just to you, but to the entire human race. How would you store, say, images from the last moon mission? How would you capture not just the data, but the context that makes the data meaningful, and then preserve it for future generations? Most importantly, how would you keep data secure and make it freely available around the world?

Answering these tough questions is a full-time job for Tom Stein, NASA Planetary Data System Geosciences Node Operations Manager at Washington University. On this episode, Stein explains how he and his team collect, preserve, and distribute terabytes of irreplaceable data generated by the space program, data that is ultimately being used to inform and improve the space program.