Speaker
Description
The ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC) develops, hosts and operates the science archives for the majority of ESA’s Space Science Missions, covering Astronomy, Planetary Science, Heliophysics and Human Robotic Exploration (HRE). Each archive aims to maximise the scientific exploitation of its datasets while ensuring their efficient long-term preservation.
Over the decades, the software architecture of these archives has evolved through several generations of technology. Historically, each mission archive was developed independently, with bespoke backend services, proprietary data access mechanisms, and custom frontend applications. While this approach addressed mission-specific needs, it has led to significant challenges, including software obsolescence, increased maintenance effort, knowledge preservation challenges, and divergent archive evolution, particularly for archives approaching the legacy phase with reduced or no dedicated archiving resources.
Aside from technical considerations, scientists moving between archives often need to adapt to different interfaces, workflows, and access mechanisms, leading to a fragmented user experience.
To address these challenges, ESDC is progressively evolving towards the strategic integration of stand-alone mission archives into a unified, scalable platform: the ESDC Multi-Missions Data Services (EMDS). EMDS enables cross-disciplinary, unified data access through the homogenization of interoperability mechanisms such as the IVOA TAP protocol and HAPI, standardizing interfaces across scientific domains while enhancing scalability, maintainability, and usability. This approach will provide the foundation for new missions, such as SMILE and Proba-3, as well as missions from other scientific domains, while allowing existing archives to progressively migrate to EMDS, ensuring their data remains accessible and preserved for long-term scientific use.
For graphical user interfaces, ESA science archives are moving towards a common Angular-based framework built around reusable components and widgets. Widgets are at the heart of our user interfaces and form the building blocks of the modern ESA science archives, such as the new HelioPhysics Archive (HPA) 1.0.0 released in June 2026.
ESDC’s approach is to establish a shared widget library across services: a collection of mission-agnostic, reusable components that can be integrated into multiple archives while preserving mission-specific capabilities. This provides a consistent user experience and interaction model across scientific domains, reduces duplicated development and maintenance effort, accelerates delivery of new functionality, and enables shared innovation where improvements developed for one archive can benefit others.
By combining EMDS, open standards, and a common widget ecosystem, ESA archives are evolving from isolated mission-specific systems into a sustainable, interoperable platform of shared capabilities. New missions can benefit from mature services and technologies from the outset, while existing archives can progressively adopt modern approaches, ensuring continued accessibility, preservation, and scientific exploitation of ESA’s data.
This presentation outlines the vision, architecture, and implementation strategy behind the evolution of ESA Science Archives towards a sustainable, interoperable, and user-focused ecosystem.