The UK Solar System Data Centre (UKSSDC) provides STFC and NERC with a jointly funded central archive and data centre facility for Solar System science in the UK. The UKSSDC supports data archives for the whole UK and world-wide solar system community encompassing solar, inter-planetary, magnetospheric, ionospheric and geomagnetic science.
This data encompasses a diverse set of satellite and ground-based observations concerning the Sun, the planets, interplanetary space and the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere (spanning many solar cycles). The UKSSDC maintains and updates a diverse set of observations from satellites and ground-based observatories concerning the Sun, interplanetary space, and the Earth's ionosphere.
As well as the modern digital archives from recent and current missions, the
data archives comprise mixed physical objects, including Solar images on glass plates and paper, Ionospheric radar measurements on paper and film, Ionospheric absorption data on paper traces and data books and reports from the 1800’s to the present day.
The UKSSDC was formed from the World Data Centre for Solar Terrestrial Physics. The original World Data Centre system as created in 1957 was dedicated to making geophysical data freely available to scientists, engineers and other interested people. This effort was co-ordinated by ICSU, the International Council of Scientific Unions. The WDC system was disbanded in October 2008 and has since been replaced by the ICSU World Data System which contains many of the original WDCs as well as many other organisations.
Examples of long-term datasets available form the UKSSDC (top)
and Solar disc and limb image from 1904 (bottom)
