Comment on Planetary Data System
I like this site. It took me a while to understand it.
But I don’t see the SIZE of the datasets in Bytes so I can plan on how large they might be and how long to download. And the tools that I need I have to find by reading. But that (the dependencies and tools to use the data) could be found once and documented and available for all users.
I don’t get any sense of community. I think there could be lots of people working on these datasets, or who might find them interesting and useful. But it is a filing system (very nice and efficient one) but no sense of other users. It is people working together that makes things happen, at least until the intelligent algorithms begin working.
Thanks for any suggestions on sizes, and I hope you will add that to the displays. The shopping cart did not work on the datasets I tried. I just used the download button, once I realized you just zipped the whole folders. There was no size information in the INDEX file listing of the files. Maybe you can change that so that it also lists the sizes. Hard to plan if you don’t know the size. I started a download of Cassini magnetometer data, and it is at 5.6 GB and going. I read the description and cannot convert the words to sizes. You KNOW the size, you just don’t seem to be telling me.Or I don’t know where to look.
