"The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Packages (ALSEPs) on Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 returned data from the lunar surface until September 1977. These long-term in-situ data, along with data from Apollo surface and orbital experiments, still comprise some of the best information on the Moon's environment. Much of these data were archived at the National Space Science Data Center (now the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive, NSSDCA) in the 1970's and 1980's, but a large portion of the data were never submitted. The data that were archived were generally on microfilm and microfiche, or on magnetic tapes in obsolete formats, making them difficult to use today. And in many cases the documentation and other ancillary information (metadata) are insufficient to allow for proper scientific use of these data. We report on the efforts of the Lunar Data Project, to: 1) put the archived data into digital formats to make them more easily obtainable and readable; 2) search for and recover data which were never archived and bring them into the NSSDCA; and 3) compile the appropriate metadata to accompany these data sets. Data sets which are completed in this way are archived with the Planetary Data System (PDS) through the Lunar Data Node at the NSSDCA under the auspices of the PDS Geosciences Node.
Nine lunar data sets have been fully restored and archived through PDS from the Apollo 12 and 15 Solar Wind Spectrometer, the Apollo 14 and 15 Cold Cathode Ion Gage, the Apollo 17 Traverse Gravimeter, and the Apollo 15 and 16 Soil Mechanics Penetrometer. A number of data sets have been restored and submitted for PDS review and are now in lien resolution: Apollo 14 and 15 Dust Detector, Apollo 15 and 17 Heat Flow, and the Apollo 15 and 16 X-Ray Spectrometer. We are currently in the process of restoring data from a large number of Apollo experiments, including the Apollo 17 Lunar Ejecta and Meteorites Experiment, the Apollo 11 and 12 Dust Detector Experiments, the Apollo 16 Active Seismic Experiment, the Apollo 17 Lunar Atmospheric Composition Experiment, the Apollo 14 Charged Particle Lunar Environment Experiment, the Apollo 14 and 15 Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment, the Apollo 17 Infrared Radiometer, and the Apollo orbital and surface magnetometers.
We are also working on new data sets as part of proposals funded by LASER, including the ALSEP ARCSAV (Telemetry) tapes, the ALSEP Housekeeping data, the Apollo 15 and 16 Mass Spectrometer data, the Apollo 17 Far-UV Spectrometer data, the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 Photography Indexes, the Apollo 17 Surface Electrical Properties Experiment, and the Apollo 14 and 15 Gamma-Ray Spectrometer. We continue to look for unarchived data and metadata from many experiments, including the Heat Flow, Lunar Ejecta and Meteorite, and Lunar Surface Gravimeter. This presentation will give an update of our efforts. The fully restored data sets are available online at the PDS Geosciences Node: http://geo.pds.nasa.gov/missions/apollo/index.htm"