I have always know there are satellites going around the earth, but more often that not now when I casually inspect the night sky I see at least one moving satellite. It’s obvious and no need for any telescope. It feels so different than when I was younger: instead of a sense of wonder at the scale of the universe and nature, it’s a constant reminder of the pervasiveness of humanity’s technology and scope for surveillance.

I don’t really have a specific point from this post other than to express a sorrow for the loss of a night sky from my youth.

I haven't really seen any videos or articles that explain how it works, what each component does, or like... what kind of fuel it uses, or what an SRB is or you know like the actual numbers and the math and such. I don't know much about rockets but I would like to learn. the official nasa website and youtube channel seem to be... dumbed down and also doesn't actually explain much about Artemis II except for showing images and videos taken from it/of it

TL;DR: NASA's public Planetary Data System is at risk of being shut down. Anyone have any ideas for backing it up?

Hi everyone,

Bit of a long-shot here, but I wanted to try on high-quality tildes before jumping back into the cesspool of reddit. I'm posting it in ~science rather than ~space as I figure interest in backing up public data is broader than just the space community.

I work regularly with NASA's Planetary Data System, or PDS. It's a massive (~3.5petabytes!!) archive of off-world scientific data (largely but not all imaging data). PDS is integral for scientific research - public and private - around the world, and is maintained, for free, by NASA (with support of a number of Academic institutions).

The current state of affairs for NASA is grim:

• NASA Lays Off ISS Workers at Marshall Space Flight Center
• More layoffs at JPL
• NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown — and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say

And as a result, I (and many of my industry friends) have become increasingly concerned that PDS will be taken down as NASA is increasingly torn down for spare parts and irreparably damaged. This administration seems bent on destroying all forms of recording-keeping and public science, so who knows how long PDS will be kept up. Once it's down, it'll be a nightmare to try and collect it all again from various sources. I suspect we'll permanently lose decades worth of data - PDS includes information going all the way back to the Apollo missions!

As such, we've been pushing to back-up as much of PDS as we can, but have absolutely no hope of downloading it all within the next year or two, nevermind in a few months if the current cuts impact us soon.

If you or someone you know would be interested in helping figure out how we can back-up PDS before it's too late, please let me know here or in a DM. I've already tried reaching out to the Internet Archive, but did not hear anything back from them.

Edit: to clarify, the larger problem is download speeds - we've topped out at 20mb/s with 8 connections.