Research historian Phil Horzempa knew the images were out there somewhere. He passionately believed that the work of thousands of middle schoolers from around the country deserved to be found.
MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) was a citizen science and education program led by astronaut Sally Ride, part of NASA’s 2011-12 GRAIL mission. While the mission’s two small spacecraft measured the moon’s gravitational field, NASA used their cameras to take lunar photos requested by the MoonKAM kids.
Because the photos weren’t science images, NASA wasn’t required to archive them, and the images were lost. For help locating them, Horzempa turned to his research stalwart: the Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility (SPIF) at Cornell.
“So I went on the hunt,” says Zoe Learner Ponterio, SPIF manager.
The trail, littered with broken links, old websites, and useless Wayback Machine images, eventually led from the University of California, San Diego to an old hard drive – long abandoned but still in good enough shape to have preserved almost a thousand MoonKAM images.
But SPIF’s work had only just begun, Ponterio discovered. The images had no metadata, nothing to indicate where on the moon the camera had been pointed. And while Horzempa was able to identify lunar features in the images, that wasn’t sufficient to pin down a spatial reference.
This past summer, Ponterio worked with four high school volunteers to find the metadata needed for the images to be useful.
“We won't know if there's scientific value until we restore the images fully, and scientists have access to the dataset,” Ponterio says. “But the thing that I've found about scientists, particularly astronomers, is that they will use any data you give them, even if it was not intended to be used for science.”
Recently, some additional image sets from MoonKAM were located, and SPIF was asked if it could become the permanent repository of the images. “Of course we accepted,” says Ponterio.
Origins of SPIF
When NASA sent its first mission into space, the Internet did not exist. There were no online databases, no easily accessible computers. Every image taken by Pioneer, Mariner, Viking, Voyager and the rest got printed out in hard copy.
But in the mid-70s, images taken by spacecraft were not stored with ideal archival methods. “I heard a story that someone found boxes of photos stored in a janitor's closet next to the paint thinner,” Ponterio says.
Thus were born NASA’s Regional Planetary Image Facilities (RPIF), an international network of 17 mission image libraries that stored the physical copies and provided places researchers could visit to use the images. NASA located these facilities in strategic locations considered to be Centers of Excellence for Planetary Exploration – and SPIF was one of the RPIFs established. This year marks its forty-sixth anniversary of technical research and outreach activities.
“The reason that Cornell has an RPIF is because it was – and is – a hotbed of planetary research,” Ponterio says. Cornell has been involved in planetary exploration since the first flyby of another world in 1964 by Mariner.
“It was a big honor to have one of these RPIFs,” adds SPIF director Alexander Hayes, the Jennifer and Albert Sohn Professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).
A New Phase of Life for SPIF
With the advent of the Internet and the huge expansion in the number of images taken by missions, half a million by Cassini alone, the RPIFs had to continually reimagine themselves. SPIF expanded its outreach activities to share with the public the vast wealth of images available, since NASA has no dedicated outreach program to do so.
“The fact that Cassini is no longer active has no impact on the breathtaking beauty and importance of the images the spacecraft acquired of Saturn,” Hayes says. “SPIF educates K-12 students and general citizens on the amazing science their hard-earned tax dollars have bought.”
And, while retaining its technical support mission, SPIF shifted from image archiving to helping scientists learn how to find, access, and analyze the data.
Despite the RPIFs evolving with the times, NASA chose to deprioritize maintaining physical facilities and cancelled the RPIF program in 2019.
The few former RPIFs that survive to this day, Cornell's among them, continue their mission to help people use the vast repository of planetary data available on NASA's online data system. Since this often involves specialized software tools and analysis techniques, these facilities continue to offer training in these applications
Cornell is especially known for its expertise in the software used for geological mapping, ArcGIS™, widely used in research of Mars and other planetary bodies.
“For well over a decade, SPIF has had a leading role in training planetary science students and scientists from across the U.S. to use ArcGIS™ to conduct research into planetary surfaces using images returned by NASA’s planetary missions,” says David Williams, research professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.
Ponterio and her four students will use ArcGIS™ in their project to identify the MoonKAM images.
NASA has provided a number of grants to SPIF to run software workshops; in addition, SPIF has had an important community impact by supporting workshops accessible to graduate students and other early-career scientists at a critical point in their professional development, Hayes says. “SPIF's continued support is key to lowering barriers to entry to planetary science so that the widest range of talented investigators can contribute,” says Hayes.
More Than Training at SPIF
But SPIF offers more than training – it also supports researchers like Horzempa in finding and formatting the data they need.
Such support is essential, Hayes says, because the data from spacecraft and from the planetary data system is not made to be accessible or user-friendly; it’s designed for maximum archival storage. To understand what the values in an image mean, to be able to project the image and access the header data, to format it appropriately for a paper or for mandated archiving of research data, requires special expertise.
“Planetary geology is a very visual science and depends on engaging and informative ways to display remote sensing data. SPIF's expertise in accessing and visualizing planetary datasets met important needs for our research team and freed us up to focus on other parts of the data analysis,” says Ajay Limaye, associate professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.
“Anybody can contact or walk into SPIF, from scientists to undergraduates, and say, ‘I have a project I want to do on this section of Mars. Can you help me find the data that I need to do it, and teach me how to process that data in a way where I can actually do my science?’” Ponterio says. “We also help them figure out how to make their published papers’ data accessible permanently through the DOI system, which is now a requirement for many journals and grants.”
SPIF never charges for such research support, though its staff are sometimes acknowledged as contributors or co-authors in published work.
“SPIF has been vital to my research efforts over the years and guided me through what can be a daunting thicket of spacecraft images,” Horzempa says. “The team of experts at SPIF may be unheralded, but they are of vital importance to the community of space scientists and historians.”
More News from A&S
Critic and art historian speaks on art, architecture and democracy
Freedom and Free Societies
