ESA Datalabs: Digital Innovation in Space Science

Designed from the ground-up with a focus on big data exploitation, open-science and collaborative research, ESA Datalabs accelerates data-intensive science, unleashing the full potential of ESA's digital offerings through a software-as-a-service delivery model to support ESA’s scientific communities in astronomy, planetary science, heliophysics, navigation and more. Based on technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, JupyterLab, and other data science packages, ESA Datalabs provides an innovative digital platform for ESA datasets and processing services. Transparently to the user, ESA Datalabs advanced network and computing capabilities leave behind traditional discovery and download science practices to showcase a new era characterized by a tight coupling of space archives with exploitation tools. This work presents ESA’s vision to provide an environment for scientific data exploitation that pivots around the paradigm shift characterized by the move of processing components to the data. We describe the rationale behind the creation of ESA Datalabs, its architecture, main features, and future steps in its development.