Add PDS support

[sbussard]

NASA PDS has a wealth of planetary data, please add if possible

[bsipocz]

@sbussard - Thanks for the suggestion. This is not on the roadmap for the near future, but we'll look into how feasible adding support for planetary science data on the longer term.

[sbussard]

PDS hosts all NASA mission data inside the solar system, excluding Earth. http://pds.nasa.gov

ESA Planetary Science Archive is also a good resource

[cmillion]

This is, in fact, quite difficult for many reasons.

[bsipocz]

@cmillion @sbussard - Yes, it's indeed extremely difficult, but not impossible (for the very long term). In my view this cannot be provided and supported with our current development model, but has to come as a contribution either directly from the PDS archive team or by people directly hired by the astroquery team to do the implementation and support (for which we don't have resources, neither aware of any grant calls where this would be a good fit).

For either case needs significant level or coordination even before any actual implementation work could start.

[cmillion]

@bsipocz - I agree with you.

[sbussard]

What's the usual approach for getting data, and what makes PDS especially difficult?

[cmillion]

You have asked two extraordinarily complicated questions in remarkably few words.

Generalized data search and data I/O are not close to solved problems in planetary science. These problems are more complicated than the analogues in astronomy more generally, which I say as someone who has done data archiving work in both domains. A lot of us are working on it, and have been for decades. There is, as @bsipocz stated, limited opportunity to be funded for such work.