Shared computational tools for analyzing laboratory ices and their infrared spectra

Open access to laboratory data in on-line databases has been expanding in recent years and has become a required part of work funded by NASA. Examples include the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS), the European SSHADE database of solid spectroscopy, and the NASA Optical Constants Database (OCdb). While open access to data grows, access to the computational tools for their processing should grow also. In this talk, I will present ongoing efforts in the Cosmic Ice Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to develop tools written in accessible (non-proprietary) computing languages such as Python or for widely distributed software applications such as Windows and Microsoft Excel. We have already published a free and open-source Python program for the calculation of optical constants from infrared data (described by Gerakines & Hudson 2020; shared at https://zenodo.org/record/4429276), and this package will be discussed along with others in development, such as for calculating infrared spectra from optical constants, finding the densities, refractive indices, and vapor pressures of ices from quartz-crystal microbalance data. See our website at https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/691/cosmicice/, where these products are shared.