Design of a distributed database for the Magellan data set from planet Venus

Huge archives of images and other data from missions to other planets are available from various sources. But searching for specific features on a planetary surface can be very tedious. As with other remote sensing data it is often hard to determine the exact image contents before placing an order and very often the size of the ordered data exceeds the area of interest by far because of the underlying data formats. To ease the access to the Magellan data set for the worldwide scientific community the authors propose the Image Server System (ISS). This system is capable of maintaining an inventory of one or many data archives. This database also holds quicklooks of all images and a map of the known areas of the planet. It can be searched via the Internet with a special client software that is capable of visualizing the planetary surface, any search results and the quicklooks of all available images. The user can order any subset of the available data. The server retrieves the ordered data from the archives and composes a data set that has exactly the extent defined by the user. These data stacks are delivered to the user on-line or on a tape