NASA s johnson space center (JSC) hosts and curates the world s most extensive and precious collection of astromaterials, with>250,000 samples of extraterrestrial materials. Over more than 40 years,…

This federal contract award, valued at $4,570,295.70, was issued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, doing business as Columbia University, to develop the Astromaterials Data System (AstroMat). AstroMat is an ecosystem of interconnected applications that will provide access to and manage the data from NASA's Johnson Space Center's extensive collection of over 250,000 extraterrestrial material samples. The project aims to curate, archive, and disseminate the wealth of scientific data generated from decades of research on these samples, aligning with principles of open data access and scientific best practices. The contract does not have a set-aside designation, indicating open competition. AstroMat will build upon the technical expertise and infrastructure of the EarthChem data systems, which have supported the management of laboratory data on physical samples for over 15 years.

NASA s johnson space center (JSC) hosts and curates the world s most extensive and precious collection of astromaterials, with>250,000 samples of extraterrestrial materials. Over more than 40 years, the astromaterials acquisition and curation office has made these samples available to the global research community to support scientific research in cosmochemistry, planetary sciences, and astronomy. Thousands of laboratory studies have been conducted over decades to describe and analyze the chemical, physical, and mineralogical properties of the samples, generating a wealth of information that has fundamentally shaped our understanding of the evolution of the solar system. The data generated by these studies are widely dispersed across decades of scientific publications and conference abstracts, and difficult to find, access, and reuse. A dedicated and comprehensive effort to curate, archive, and provide access to these data has been lacking. The astromaterials data system (astromat) is intended to fulfill this role and provide a comprehensive long-term solution to the management, archiving, and dissemination of past, present, and future laboratory data of samples from JSC s astromaterials collections. Astromat will align management of these data with principles for continued free and open access to scientific data, improved ease of use and discoverability, enhanced science applications, and incorporation of best practices that have recently been laid out for NASA s strategic planning effort to maximize the scientific return on NASA data. Astromat is designed as an ecosystem of interconnected applications that provide human- and machine-readable interfaces to the data managed in the astromat data store. The various components of the ecosystem serve specific purposes and include databases (astrodb; repodb); interfaces for users to search, access, explore, visualize, analyze, and contribute data (astrosearch, astroref, astroplot, astrodesk, astrorepo); software tools for data curators to compile, track, validate, ingest, manage, and annotate data (astroadmin); and machine-actionable interfaces that connect the databases to internal and external software tools (astroapis, repoapis). Over the course of 5 years, data from approximately 1,500 publications the lunar, antarctic meteorite, cosmic dust, genesis, hayabusa, stardust, and microparticle impact collections will be compiled into a single synthesis, together with relevant information about the provenance of the analytical measurements (e.g., analytical instrumentation, laboratory, sample preparation procedures, instrument calibration, data reduction) and to the quality of the data. Focus will initially be on geochemical, mineralogical, and geochronological data, but content will be extended later to include additional data types such as experimental petrology, images, and spectrography. Content of the moondb database of lunar sample data, which has already been compiled over the past 4 years with funding from two NASA awards, will be integrated into astrodb. Astromat aims to advance and promote a culture in astromaterials research, where open data sharing is recognized as an ethical norm rather than a burden. In order to achieve this goal, astromat will provide a service for researchers to publish and archive their data as citable scholarly contributions (astrorepo) following international best practices for data publication and data citation, while at the same time engage and train the community through workshops, webinars, newsletters, and the astromat web site to grow use of astromat and adoption of open and fair data principles in the astromaterials research community. Astromat will build on the technical achievements, the established and recognized curation practices and data standards, and the operational infrastructure of the earthchem data systems and services which have supported the management of laboratory data acquired on physical samples for over 15 years.