The NSSDC Master Catalog (NMC) is an on-line information system providing information about past, present, and future NASA and non-NASA spaceflight missions and about the investigations flown or scheduled to fly on those missions. The NMC also provides detailed information about data primarily archived at the NSSDC. In addition, the NMC describes publications and people. The NMC is intended to support the needs of the scientific research community and of NASA management.
The NMC has its heritage in NSSDC's information system, which has supported various paper catalogs and reports over the years, and in its Automated Internal Management (AIM) file, which described approximately 15,000 objects including spacecraft, experiments, and data sets.
NSSDC has forms-based query interfaces for NMC. These query interfaces are sometimes supplemented by static links on our discipline pages which dynamically query the NMC database and produce appropriate output.
There are currently several ways to query the NMC database. Many of the queryable objects (e.g., spacecraft) are cross-linked to other objects, enabling multiple ways to explore for information. A description of the multiple query methods is available on the main NMC page.