Pergamon Piutwf. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSR Space %I’.. Vol. 44. No. I, pp. 55.-64. 1996 Copyright m(_‘ 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0032-0633i96 $15.00+0.00 The Planetary Plasma Interactions Node of the Planetary Data System Raymond J. Walker,’ Steven P. Joy,’ Todd A. King,’ Christopher T. Russell,’ Robert L. McPherron’ and William S. Kurth’ ’ Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles. CA 90024-1567. U.S.A. ’ Department of Earth and Space Science and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California. Los Angeles, CA 90024-1567, U.S.A. ‘Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa. Iowa City. IA 52242-1479. U.S.A. Received 20 November 1994 ; accepted 26 July 1995 . Five years ago NASA selected scientists at to form the Planetary Plasma Interactions (PPI) Node to help the scient&c community locate, access and preserve particles aud fUeld data from plan- etary missions. Sizxe planetary plasma data are varied and require expertisein many areas the PPI Node is disbud with au Outer Planets Subnode at the Uni- versity of Iowa,.au Inner Planets Subnode at UCLA and a Radio Astronomy Subnode at GSFC. The PPI Node has tried to serve the science community, by pro- viding them with high quality data products. It has zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA warked with missions and individual scientists to secure qdty possible and to thoroughly t it. The PPI Node has validated the data, placed it on long lasting media and made sure it was properly archived for use. So far it has prepared and archived over 10” bytes of data and has produced 17 1 CD-ROMs with peer reviewed data. 11k so doing an efficient system has been developed to prepare and archive the zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA data and enable to increase the at which data are Although the Node prodxxed substantial archive the initial years, it an even amount of in progress. includes preparing data sets all of zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Voywer, Pioneer and Ulysses data at Jupiter and Saturn. It is also completing the Pioneer Venus data restoration. The Galileo Venus archive and radio science data from Ma&an will be prepared early in 1995. It is as&sting the Small Bodies Node of PDS n of comet data and with the prep- users have been provided with software tools to manage C’orrespordmcc~ to : R. J. Walker and read the data which are computer, operating sys- tem and data format independent. Scalable systems have been developed so that the same software used to manage and access the data for the entire PPI Node can be used by individual investigatxxs to manage the data on a single CD-ROM thereby greatly reducing the software development effort for both the PPI Node and users. This software is delivered with the disks. The PPI Node data holdings are available over the Internet. They can be accessed through the World Wide Web (WWW) at Universal Resource Locator (URL) http ://~.ig~.ucla~~u/s~/~s~i/Welco~.html. Users without a WWW browser can use the WWW interface by signing into the host “pdsppi.igpp.ucla. edu” as “pdsuser”. 1. Introduction For over 30 years space plasma physicists have studied the interaction of the Earth’s magnetosphere with the solar wind. Although in this process we have developed a rather detailed understanding of many of the phenomena involved, the bulk of our knowledge has been limited to a rather narrow range of parameters that occur naturally at the Earth. More recently we have been challenged to test that understanding by applying our ideas to the vastly wider range of parameters involved in the interaction of the solar wind with other planetary magnetospheres. At Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. and Neptune the inter- action is to first order similar to the Earth’s in that a super Alfvenic magnetized plasma impinges on a planetary mag- netic field forming a magnetospheric cavity. However, there are many important differences and by studying these differences across the suite of planets. we learn more about how planetary magnetospheres work. Also plan-