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Welcome to the PyPDS wiki!

PyPDS is a pure Python ⁴ interface to PDS data products. For more information about PDS formatted files check out the Planetary Data System. Specifically, the following may be useful.

• PDS Standards Reference (see PL D-7669, Part 2¹)
• Planetary Science Data Dictionary (PDF containing 582 pages, see JPL D-7116²)
• Planetary Data System Proposer’s Archiving Guide, JPL D-26359. (see JPL D-26359³)

Another project to interface with PDS files is called Bippy. Bippy does not appear to be maintained and its author claims “It doesn’t exist yet in a form suitable for public distribution”.

If you have a bunch of FITS formatted files PyFITS is probably what you are looking for.

NASAView may be found at the PDS Software Tools download page. Opening FHA01118.LBL in NASAView will result in an image with less information than the image returned by the ImageExtractor.extract method. According to the PDS,

NASAView is a PDS archive product display program that runs on multiple platforms in a GUI environment. This application was built using the Label Library Light (L3), Object Access Library (OAL) and the XVT Development Solution for C package. Label Library Light parses PDS ODL labels and creates an in-memory representation of the label information. The Object Access Library uses the parse tree and accesses the actual PDS object. The XVT Development solution supplies the cross-platform GUI support and an object-oriented environment.

¹ Planetary Data System Standards Reference, PL D-7669, Part 2. PDF Version of the entire 531 page document

² Planetary Science Data Dictionary Document, JPL D-7116

³ Planetary Data System (PDS) Proposer’s Archiving Guide (PAG), JPL D-26359.

⁴ If you’re really keeping track then be aware that the Python Imaging Library is not pure. It is an extension module.