NASA’s PDS Releases Voyager 2 Uranus Radio Astronomy Data

On August 13, NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) added a bundle of Voyager 2 data from the probe’s flyby of Uranus to its online archive. The release includes data from the probe’s Planetary Radio Astronomy (PRA) instrument collected between 1985 and 1988.

The PRA instrument measured radio emissions from the planets, detected plasma resonances near the giant planets, and identified lightning on the giant planets. The Uranus observations in this bundle span 70 instrument channels, covering 1326.0 to 1.2 kHz.

Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft so far to visit Uranus and Neptune. The probe is currently flying through interstellar space, outside the heliopause — the bubble of energetic particles and magnetic fields from the Sun.

For more news and recent data releases from PDS, visit the PDS website.

NASA Exoplanet Archive Now Searchable with Natural Language Assistant

Users can now search NASA’s Exoplanet Archive via the beta version of AstroFetch, a conversational interface for astronomical data archives. AstroFetch was created by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) and the California Institute of Technology’s IPAC science and data center. The Exoplanet Archive is the first database supported by the interface, with more to come in the future.

AstroFetch translates the user’s natural language prompt into Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL) and runs that query on the data archive. All results display the ADQL that AstroFetch ran, so users can check whether it executed the right function.

The tool has built-in capabilities to create plots, execute Python scripts on the data, and search for scientific literature. The model draws from a curated knowledge base of documentation about the Exoplanet Archive to increase the accuracy and usefulness of its results.

Interested beta testers can sign up at https://astrofetch.ipac.caltech.edu. The service advises that AstroFetch results should be considered drafts, and users should check results against their normal workflow.

For more information about AstroFetch, see the AstroFetch FAQ page. For more updates from the Exoplanet Archive, see the NASA Exoplanet Archive News page.

Suomi NPP Data Users Advised to Switch to NOAA Satellite Data

The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite is a joint mission between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that examines the dynamics of clouds, oceans, vegetation, ice, solid Earth, and atmosphere.

On August 3, NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) announced that delivery of science data products from Suomi NPP will cease on November 1, 2026. Suomi NPP data users may transition to products from the NOAA-21 and NOAA-20 satellites, which are part of the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) fleet and were designed to continue the Suomi NPP legacy by providing comparable science data products via similar instruments.

For more information on the Suomi NPP data transition, read the full article on the Earthdata website. For other updates on Earth science data releases, retirements, and outages, visit the Earthdata Data Alerts page.

NASA Archive Hosts Cosmic Ray Particle Catalog

On August 4, NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) announced that it had ingested the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) All Particle Rates Catalog. AMS-02 is a cosmic ray particle detector that was installed on the International Space Station in May 2011.

The catalog, which has a shortened name of AMS02RATES, records the incident rates for all particle species detected by AMS-02. The instrument collects information from cosmic sources emanating from stars and galaxies millions of light years beyond the Milky Way, as well as detecting antimatter and dark matter.

For more information on the AMS02RATES catalog, visit the AMS02RATES page. For more updates on high-energy astrophysics data, visit the HEASARC News page.