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There are actually plenty of ftp-servers etc. in the U.S. and Europe, which host raw and pre-processed data of various instruments from old space exploration missions. Usually it is for free, although in a few cases one must leave a name and an e-mail-address before being granted access to the archives. Some of them host bits and pieces of old Soviet stuff too, such as data form Venera missions to Venus. But there is only very limited data on the internet as far as I have seen.

Does anyone know of websites, ftp-servers or similar, which host such data?

(I must admit, that I do not speak Russian, so I have a hard time googling through the depth of the Russian internet ...)

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  • $\begingroup$ See also Open Data $\endgroup$
    – gerrit
    Jul 19, 2013 at 0:25
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    $\begingroup$ From personal experience, getting the data is not enough, you will need documentation too. Little is more frustrating than years of data in an undocumented binary format with undocumented calibration factors. $\endgroup$
    – gerrit
    Jul 19, 2013 at 0:26
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    $\begingroup$ @gerrit: Hallelujah, this is so true. Good archives also keep calibration data (if there is any) and some meta data. Bad archives do not ... Anyway, some raw-data can be a huge improvement over some insane figures in ancient papers which where scanned with crappy scanners and uploaded with compression artefacts all over the place. This is equally frustrating. $\endgroup$
    – s-m-e
    Jul 19, 2013 at 0:38
  • $\begingroup$ can anything from here help? ultimax.com/products.html and russianspaceweb.com looks like a great resource, but I'm afraid i couldn't find data $\endgroup$
    – John Riselvato
    Jul 21, 2013 at 8:55

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I've been searching around, and found some piecemealed data. Here's what I can find.

  1. Some very limited data is available from the Planetary Data Archives, mostly in the form of cooperative missions with NASA
  2. I found some data on this website, from the Space Research Institute
  3. Some of it appears to be hosted on a private network similar to the WW2, known as the Russian Space Science Network. Not being a member, I can't confirm.

Bottom line is, Soviet data is just harder to get at, due to the heightened security during the time of the Cold War, and much of that data just isn't public even today. Hopefully this will change someday

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    $\begingroup$ The Planetary Data Archives is where I found the Venera data, I think. They had the raw image data, which was sent back from Venus. Thanks for the other two links. It looks like mostly new stuff. But anyway, I'll look into them. $\endgroup$
    – s-m-e
    Jul 21, 2013 at 21:19

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