Software for Retrieval and Display of Planetary Data

The NASAView computer program provides access to, and display of, sets of scientific data in the Planetary Data System (PDS) archive. These data — totalling about 5 terabytes — were acquired during NASA's planetary-exploration missions and are stored along with descriptive information useful for retrieving and interpreting the data. NASAView is designed to be usable on multiple platforms (including Sun/UNIX, Apple Power PC, and PC/Win32 computers and operating systems). NASAView converts between machine-specific data representations as necessary and provides graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with a common look and feel on all the platforms. NASAView incorporates the PDS Label Library Light (L³) and the PDS Object Access Library (OAL), which are the standard software libraries for production and use of the PDS archive. The L³ reads and parses a data-product label and provides access to label information by use of standard function calls. Using the label information, the OAL manipulates the scientific data at the physical-record, data-representation, and object (data-product-as-a-whole) layers. NASAView also incorporates the XVT Portability Toolkit™software, which provides the capabilities for development and use of the common GUIs on different platforms and ensures the same application functionality on the various platforms.