The PDS is an active archive that makes available well documented, peer reviewed planetary data to the research community.
When a proprietary format is submitted to the archive (such as a Microsoft Word document) an accompanying plain text file is also required.
It is assumed that the scientists of the future will at least be able to make sense of regular ASCII bytes even if the proprietary software and support ceases to exist.
PDS adheres to many other standards including, but not limited to, special directory and file naming conventions and label requirements.
[2]: 39 The Solar System Exploration Data Services Office at the Goddard Space Flight Center handles PDS Project Management.
The purpose of the roadmap effort was to outline a strategy for moving forward in planetary data archiving under the auspices of a rapidly growing data volume (nearly 1 petabyte at present), new computing capabilities, tools, and facilities, and a growing community of planetary science investigators.