Interoperable Mars atmosphere data Services

Modern space borne instruments produce huge datasets, especially on long-lived missions such as Mars-Express. This calls for new ways to handle the data, not only to perform mass processing, but also more basically to access them easily and efficiently. Virtual Observatory (VO) techniques developed in Astronomy during the past 15 years can be adapted to address this problem, provided they are enlarged to include specificities of Solar System studies such as coordinate systems, target-related time scales (lo- cal time and season), or measured quantities. An effort to adapt VO techniques to Solar System stud- ies has been started in the frame of the Europlanet program, first in FP7 (2009-2012) as a demonstrator, and now in Horizon2020 (2015-2019) in a more ex- tensive way. In the current program Europlanet 2020, the VESPA activity deals with the infrastructure and implements new data services. VESPA stands for Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access and supports all aspects of Solar System science. Its de- velopments are essentially based on the standards of the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alli- ance). As part of this enlargement, several data services related to the Martian atmosphere were recently de- signed and released, including a set of SPICAM de- rived data and a demonstrator of VO access to the Mars Climate Database. In both cases, vertical pro- files are distributed with the basic VESPA architec- ture. In this abstract, we present the two services and assess this type of access to a simulation service.