...George Borg During the mid–twentieth century, geochemistry—one of the core Earth sciences—underwent a spectacular transformation as a result of the introduction of electronic instruments based on physical principles. In this process, mass spectrometry became the workhorse analytical technique...

... of scientific data to third-party users. Since 1990, NASA has established several such facilities, each rooted in a subset of the Earth science disciplines and each making its data publicly available via the Internet. In so doing, it reversed a decades-old policy that had given an instrument's science team...