ESE Data and Information System Services
Terabytes of data come back from orbiting NASA satellites every day, providing society a greater capacity to assess the health of the Earth than ever before. This necessitates an efficient set of services to receive, process and distribute the data.

The Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) has been handling existing data sets since 1994. It began working with raw satellite data following the launch of the Tropical Rainfall Monitoring Mission (TRMM) in November 1997. The system also manages data from other satellites such as Landsat 7 and Terra and provides command and control functions for Terra. EOSDIS works in tandem with NASA’s primary satellite network, the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS), and eight major remote sites called Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAAC’s), each of which specializes in serving a particular scientific discipline. Scientific products for Terra are being generated in partnership with the mission’s principal investigators and their home institutions. This trend will grow with future EOS missions and competitive selections of creative data processing proposals from universities and commercial providers. EOSDIS is accessible to scientists as well as the general public. It is based on an “open architecture” that can be updated as computer technology improves and research questions evolve over the coming decades.

This image was acquired on December 4, 2001 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard Terra. The image centers on Northern India. Pollution (the grayish haze) can be seen all along the southern edge of the snowcapped Himalayan Mountains to the north and streams southward to Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. Most of the aerosols are byproducts of human activities.

The Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIPs) was created in 1998 as an experiment in developing a federated system for data management. The notion was that this should be a decentralized, heterogeneous and distributed data and information system taking EOSDIS data to the next step by generating products tailored by and for specific uses in society. The ESIPs combine their collective resources (data, technology, knowledge and education) to increase the quality and widen the usage of Earth science data and create new interoperability tools for Earth data resources. They work to make it increasingly practical for end-users of Earth Science data to access information without having to navigate through a maze of data and cataloging issues.

NASA hopes to incorporate many of the “lessons learned” and technologies developed through the ESIP Federation as it begins to plan the Strategic Evolution of ESE Data Systems — a project known as SEEDS. Capitalizing on the assets developed by EOSDIS and the ESIP Federation, as well as emerging information technology, ESE will evolve its data and information system and services both to handle data from future missions and to involve and serve a broader range of information suppliers and users.

ESE Advanced Technology Program
In 1998, ESE established an Advanced Technology Program to meet the needs of its Research Strategy for new and lower cost instruments, computing, communications, and related technologies. A dedicated technology program allows technology development to take place offline from mission project development; systematic missions employ the best available technology, while exploratory missions are proposed only after needed technologies reach a sufficient level of maturity. The Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) located at Goddard Space Flight Center sponsors technology efforts that span the Technology Readiness Index from basic principles to spaceflight demonstration, primarily through open, competitive solicitations to draw the best ideas from academia, industry and government laboratories.

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Earth Science Enterprise
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Data and Information System
Partnerships