ESA Data Discovery Portal

Over several decades, ESA has been producing a wealth of data holdings coming from its spacecrafts. These data treasure is made available to ESA users and to the scientific community through science data archives, usually organized by discipline (i.e. Space Science, Earth Science, Human and Robotic Exploration) and could be found on different web sites with distinct types of interfaces (web GUI, scriptable API, visualization tools, …).

While each of these serve best their community, meeting the relevant user and science cases, there was also a need to have a unified portal, where all ESA data holdings could be referenced through a common ontology, queried through simple searches, and later can be accessed and visualized from the corresponding data archive, and further analyzed in the science platform ESA Datalabs.

This is the purpose of the ESA Data Discovery Portal, located at data.esa.int, under which all ESA data holdings have been given a dedicated DOI (Digital Object Identifier), that will also ensure a permanent identifier for each data holdings in the long term, even if the underlying mission data archive entry point might change over time.