Engineering
ELSA: Metadata Tooling for NASA's Planetary Data System
- Role
- Research Assistant / Software Developer
- Period
- May 2024 – Present
- Stack
- ELSA
- Bootstrap 5
- 2FA
- reCAPTCHA
Context#
NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS) is the long-term archive for data from planetary missions; its Atmospheres Node curates atmospheric datasets. Archiving to PDS is only useful if the metadata is correct and complete, and producing that metadata by hand for large datasets is slow and error-prone. ELSA is the web application that makes this tractable: it helps planetary scientists generate and archive metadata for large datasets so the data becomes searchable and reusable.
What I built#
- Atmospheric Modeling Annex (frontend lead). I led the frontend for a new PDS service that archives planetary atmospheric model data, a new class of archive for the node.
- Security features. Added two-factor authentication (2FA) and reCAPTCHA, hardening access to the tool.
- UI modernization. Rebuilt ELSA's interface on Bootstrap 5 for responsive, usable layouts across devices.
Pipeline sketch: ELSA sits between scientists’ datasets and the archive: it turns data that would need hand-written metadata into archive-ready submissions, now including atmospheric models via the Annex.
Impact#
ELSA lets scientists produce archive-ready metadata for large datasets that would otherwise be prohibitively tedious to prepare, and the Atmospheric Modeling Annex extends the node's archive to a new data type.