Cassini mission looking for input from amateur processors, UX designer for archive wants to understand how people will use it Options

[robtapella]

Hi everyone—

I am working with the Cassini team at JPL which, as you know, is moving into end-of-mission planning. I’m currently learning about how scientists search-for, calibrate, and analyze data from the PDS. My goal is to recommend search-tools or related products that will support the final archival data products. I would also like to find the most important pain-points with the existing site.

I am looking for people:
- Who have analyzed Cassini data
- Who are NOT on a Cassini instrument team
- Who found and downloaded the data from a public archive/repository (e.g. from PDS—not from one of the instrument team archives, and not via email or a publication—the search process is the foundation of what I am trying to understand)
- Who would like to walk me through an example of _how_ they have searched for, calibrated, and/or analyzed data in the past

If you fit this profile, and you’d like to help out, please contact me via email.

Feel free to ask any clarification questions here and I can answer them for everyone.

Rob Tapella
rtapella@jpl.nasa.gov
UX Designer, NASA-JPL Science Data Applications

[robtapella]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will also follow up with some specific users directly (like JohnVV!).

What I am looking for right now is people to talk to! Observing people as they search for data is super helpful and full of interesting information. If you fit the criteria list, please email me and we can chat on the phone or via WebEx.

I am learning about different goals of search and how the available PDS tools are used to support those goals, and where they fall short. For example "I'm looking at the red stripey things on Tethys, so I want all the images with phase angle X taken of region Y of Tethys. I use the imaging node search tool with parameters ABC and sort through the results by blah blah etc. I really wish I could just point to a location on Tethys and download all the ISS and VIMS data at that location." Seeing this in action gives a lot of explicit needs, implicit needs and mental models around search.

Strange behavior and bugs are also helpful to identify specific pain points with the existing tools, although that is a secondary goal of my current research.

Rob
rtapella@jpl.nasa.gov