NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive

• 1. Introduction

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  The NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive, known as the NSSDCA, has been unavailable or stuck in maintenance mode since at least August 2025. Decades of spacecraft records, mission data, and public-facing tools sit behind that outage. What does this archive actually hold, how did it come together, and what happens to the material inside while the doors stay shut?

• 2. The Archive's Mandate

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  Space science, in the archive's own terms, covers astronomy and astrophysics, solar and space plasma physics, and planetary and lunar science. NSSDCA does not work alone within that scope. It teams with NASA's discipline-specific active archives, giving researchers, and sometimes the general public, direct access to data. NSSDCA also serves as NASA's permanent archive for space physics mission data, providing access to several geophysical models and to data from some non-NASA missions.

  The Solar System Exploration Data Services Office, within the Solar System Exploration Division, oversees NSSDCA. The Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate sponsors it. NSSDCA also acts in concert with various NASA discipline data systems to provide certain data and services.

  Web-based services let the archive reach beyond researchers to the general public, offering spacecraft information and digital versions of selected imagery. Its database tracks information about data held at NSSDCA and, in some cases, other facilities, along with the spacecraft and experiments behind that data. NSSDCA's remit also includes data management standards and technologies. The archive did not always operate under this name: before March 2015, it was known as the National Space Science Data Center.

• 3. From Tape To Internet

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  In 1966, the archive first took shape as NSSDC at Goddard Space Flight Center. Its staff has long consisted largely of physical scientists, computer scientists, analysts, programmers, and data technicians. Counting both civil service employees and onsite contractors, staffing levels have ranged between 15 and 100 people over the archive's lifetime.

  7-track and 9-track tape, along with various photoproducts, carried most of NSSDCA's early data. Every bit of it went out through media replication and mailing. Starting in the mid-1980s, the archive began receiving and sending out growing volumes of data over electronic networks. Today, dissemination runs through the internet, using either HTTP or FTP.

  That shift from tape and mail to networked delivery reshaped what the archive could offer next: catalogs, galleries, and tools reachable from any browser.

• 4. Astrophysics On Demand

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  The Multiwavelength Milky Way sits inside NSSDCA's Data Services area, alongside the Multimedia Catalog and the NSSDC Photo Gallery. Together these three resources package data and mission information for public and researcher use alike.

  Flight Mission Information holds lists of flight missions and details about each one. The NSSDC Master Catalog itself lives inside this same section, alongside mission-specific access points and a graphical interface for browsing missions visually.

  Related Information Services layer in more detail about the data NSSDC holds. That detail is reachable through the Master Catalog as well as through dedicated NSSDC Lunar and Planetary Science and NSSDC Heliophysics pages.

  Four sister centers round out NASA's astrophysics data landscape. HEASARC is the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center. IRSA is the Infrared Science Archives. LAMBDA is the Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis. MAST is the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. Behind many of those links sits a single searchable index, built to answer far more specific questions than a browsing menu alone could.

• 5. The Master Catalog

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  Spacecraft Query opens directly into a database of orbital, suborbital, and interplanetary spacecraft, letting users search NSSDCA's holdings by vehicle. Experiment Query works the same way for the science hardware itself, surfacing information about experiments that flew aboard various missions.

  Data Collection Query narrows the search to the data itself, covering primarily what NSSDCA currently holds in its own archive. Personnel Query, by contrast, locates people, returning locator information for staff and researchers tied to particular missions or data collections.

  Lunar and Planetary Map Query searches the lunar and planetary maps NSSDCA keeps in stock. New and Updated Data Query flags collections that have recently gained new material, whether fresh additions or entirely new sets.