Hosted at the IAS space astrophysics institute in Orsay, MEDOC’s mission is to preserve solar physics data and make them available to the national and international scientific community. In this capacity, it maintains the record of science data from experiments with a French contribution and provides them to research scientists.

MEDOC develops and supplies data processing tools to serve the scientific community, while guaranteeing that archives remain accessible for several tens of years as data formats evolve. These tools include the Helioviewer solar data browser and the filament detection tool.

A unique feature of MEDOC goes back to its inception in 1995 to plan observations of the SOHO satellite, whose mission has been extended to the end of 2018. It is now set to resume this task for the SPICE instrument on the future SOLAR ORBITER mission scheduled to launch in 2019.

Since 1995, MEDOC has built up a record of international data from other solar physics spacecraft, like for example NASA’s TRACE and STEREO satellites, Roscosmos’ Spirit/Coronas and CNES’s PICARD. It is also involved in the space weather side of ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme.

MEDOC is governed by a joint agreement between CNES, which funds the data centre, the INSU national institute for universe sciences (CNRS) and Paris Sud University, which supply staff and premises.

See the MEDOC website