Anonymous FTP Access

FTP Access to Online Volumes
Updated June 3, 2008

All the archive volumes that are online via Geosciences Node web pages are also accessible via anonymous FTP. For those archives that are especially large or expected to grow rapidly, we have added dedicated FTP servers, as shown below.

The FTP URL for any Geosciences data set is made up of the FTP server name followed by the data set ID, minus the ".0" at the end. For example, Odyssey GRS EDRs can be ftp'd from ftp://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/ody-ftp/ody-m-grs-2-edr-v1. You may also click the server links above and browse through the data on each server using your web browser..

Use FTP Instead of Web Browser to Download Binary Files

Our experience has been that it's better to use a dedicated FTP client rather than a Web browser to download binary data files. Web browsers use a combination of methods to determine whether a file to be downloaded is text or binary. Sometimes a browser will guess wrong, especially in the case of binary data files with attached PDS labels, such as MGS MOLA and TES data products. To ensure that the data files you download are not corrupted during the transfer, use FTP and specify binary mode. On the other hand, if you just want to read the documentation or other text files, then a Web browser will work fine.

Another advantage of using FTP is that you can transfer multiple files at once, if you are using an FTP program that allows this. There are several FTP clients available for free that do this. SmartFTP and FileZilla are two such programs that we have used with success.

If you use SmartFTP, you will need to change a few settings so that it will work properly with our FTP server.  On the menu bar, go to Tools->Settings, then click on the Advanced tab and uncheck the boxes for Show Hidden Files, Force Long Format, and Resolve Links.  This prevents SmartFTP from sending unnecessary messages that our server cannot understand.  If you are behind a firewall, you may also need to go into the Settings window, click on the Connection tab and ensure that the "Use Passive Mode" box is checked. We have noticed that SmartFTP is not able to resume interrupted downloads when used with certain Internet Service Providers such as Earthlink.

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