CSDA Program Announces Eight New Data Agreements

CSDA Program Announces Eight New Data Agreements

NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program announced eight new agreements with seven of its commercial partners— Airbus Defense and Space GEO Inc (Airbus U.S.), Capella Space Corporation, ICEYE US, MDA Space, Planet Labs, Umbra, and Vantor (formerly Maxar)—to give users more access to near‑global multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. With these agreements, the CSDA program further advances its mission to acquire data from commercial providers that supports NASA’s Earth science research and applications, and expands the quality, coverage, and range of Earth observation data NASA offers to the scientific community.

“These new agreements will provide users with a range of high-quality multispectral and SAR data that can be used in a variety of applications from environmental monitoring to surface deformation,” said CSDA Project Manager Dana Ostrenga. “In addition, they exemplify the CSDA Program’s commitment to acquiring data that enhances and supports the agency’s application and research objectives.”

New Near-Global, Multispectral Imagery

In support of NASA programs and stakeholders, the CSDA program enacted three agreements with Planet, Airbus, and Vantor (formerly Maxar) to provide near‑global multispectral and pan‑sharpened electro‑optical satellite imagery of nearly all global land and coastal surfaces. This imagery has a spatial resolution of approximately 30 centimeters, 1 meters, and up to 10 meters (depending on the product) and is suitable for applications including environmental monitoring, agriculture, and urban applications. Data products will include Top of Atmosphere radiances and surface reflectance across the visible and near‑infrared spectrum.

New SAR Data

In response to NASA’s and users’ needs for SAR data, and following rigorous technical and programmatic evaluation, CSDA executed five agreements for high‑resolution SAR imagery, including tasked Spotlight, StripMap, Scan, Wide/Extended Spotlight, and Long‑Dwell modes, with Capella, ICEYE, MDA, Umbra, and Airbus. These SAR capabilities provide all‑weather, day‑night imaging that complements the electro‑optical agreements and enhances NASA’s ability to monitor dynamic processes such as flooding, land deformation, sea‑ice motion, and infrastructure impacts. Further, under these agreements, each commercial partner will provide specific data requirements consistent with their respective sensor capabilities and performance, as well as tasking and archive access.

Increased Access and User Eligibility

The data acquired under these agreements will be made available to authorized commercial satellite data users in accordance with the CSDA Program’s End User License Agreements (EULAs).  EULAs generally pertain to NASA‑funded investigators and designated collaborators and outline established mechanisms for accessing CSDA data, such as the CSDA Satellite Data Explorer (SDX) and related portals. Users can contact the CSDA Program at csda-support@nasa.gov to obtain additional information about user agreements, detailed product specifications, and procedures for requesting and accessing these commercial datasets for their research and application activities.

About the CSDA Program

NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD) established the CSDA Program to identify, evaluate, and acquire data from commercial providers that to support NASA’s Earth science research and applications. NASA recognizes the potential of commercial satellite constellations to advance Earth System Science and applications for societal benefit and believes commercially acquired data may also can augment the Earth observations acquired by NASA, and other U.S. government agencies, and NASA’s international partners.

All data from CSDA contract-awarded vendors are evaluated by the investigator-led CSDA project teams that assess the value of adding a vendor’s data to CSDA’s data holdings based on their quality and how they might benefit in the context of NASA Earth science research and applications. To learn more about the program, its commercial partners, data evaluation process, and more, visit the CSDA website.

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Notes from the Field

Looking at Chlorophyll from Space

By Compton “Jim” Tucker

NASA scientists are able to study plants from space, but this wasn’t always the case.

“I love using satellite data to study the Earth,” says Dr. Compton “Jim” Tucker. When Tucker was a graduate student, he and some friends discovered a new way to study photosynthesis.

“We realized that there was a really strong connection with the plant pigment, chlorophyll, and certain wavelengths of light. We figured out that if you wanted to study photosynthesis you needed to study chlorophyll.”

Tucker learned that you could figure out plant health by measuring how much visible and near-infrared light a plant reflects. “We call this light-type comparison the Normalized Differentiated Vegetation Index (NDVI). Really it is just a simple ratio of these two wavelengths or bands.”

This was groundbreaking science. Tucker also learned that this observation and comparison could be done from space. In 1981 the first NDVI instrument flew in space as part of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) mission. “It is the same instrument from my working-in-the-field days, literally, just bigger.”

Later in 1983, Tucker met Piers Sellers. This meeting began a decades-long friendship and scientific collaboration. Sellers came up with a way to scale Tucker’s photosynthesis measurements. This made it possible to get detailed information about plant health around the globe — from a single leaf to plants covering a field, a forest, or a continent and all from space.

“People are always asking me when I plan to retire,” Tucker says. “And I always say that I really like what I am doing. I am going to do it for as long as I can because it is fun. Most people look at me and think ‘Are you crazy?’ I am not. It is true: I really love my work.”

About the Author

• Compton “Jim” Tucker

  Compton “Jim” Tucker is a Senior Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center (GSFC). Tucker has been able to travel to some pretty exciting places to do research. This image was taken while in the field in the Amazon. Jim’s beard, usually white, appears red in this picture. He used a special native Amazonian fruit, to dye his hair red for fun.

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42 Years of Measuring the Sun, the Earth and the Energy in Between

By Denise Lineberry

On Jan. 31, 1958, Explorer 1 became the first satellite launched by the United States. Its primary science instrument, a cosmic ray detector, was designed to measure the radiation environment in Earth orbit. Though its final transmission was in May 1958, it continued to revolve around Earth more than 58,000 times. As those looping orbits continued, NASA was busy building other ground-breaking instruments to observe and better understand Earth’s systems.

By 1975, just five years after Explorer 1 burned up as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, NASA’s first Nimbus instrument launched, providing the first global, direct observations of the amount of solar radiation entering and exiting Earth. This helped confirm and improve the earliest climate models and laid the groundwork for NASA’s Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE).

By the 1970s, the ERBE team was beginning to plan for the next phase of Earth Radiation Budget measurements. Retired experiment scientist for ERBE, Bruce Barkstrom, recalled the very first ERBE science team meeting involved a full day of attempting to determine exactly where the top of the atmosphere was. After much debate, they assigned one person at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, to develop the number, which ended up being about 18 miles (30 kilometers) above the sphere that forms the Earth.

“That was the level of detail we had to get into as a science team,” Barkstrom said.

In October 1984, ERBE launched aboard NASA’s Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) from the space shuttle Challenger (STS-41G).

“We had to get up at 3:30 a.m. to watch the ERBS launch at 7:30 a.m., and what I remember about that particular morning was that we had an overcast sky. And when the shuttle lit up, it was such a bright exhaust that it lit up the whole sky from underneath,” Barkstrom recalled. “And then, of course, the shuttle went through the clouds, and the light dimmed, and probably about a minute later the sky lit up again because the sun was reflected off the exhaust.

“It’s impossible for me to describe this without getting a little emotional.”

For 10 years, ERBE provided invaluable data for scientists studying the energy interactions between the Sun, clouds and Earth. Its satellite measurements have provided new information on Earth’s radiation at the top of the atmosphere, including the important radiative effects of clouds on incoming and outgoing energy in the overall process.

In the late 1980s, satellite instruments provided the first direct observation that clouds cooled Earth’s climate. Former CERES Principal Investigator Bruce Wielicki developed an algorithm to apply to Nimbus and ERBE models to help quantify cloud forcing — the difference between the radiation budget components for average cloud conditions and cloud-free conditions.

With new knowledge about the important role that clouds play in Earth’s energy budget, the science team was anxious to gather more data. In 1997, the first in a new series of instruments, the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), launched, extending the important ERBE measurements.

Six other CERES instruments have since been activated in space to measure the solar energy reflected by Earth, the heat the planet emits, and the role of clouds in that process.

“The CERES instrument is small, it’s very elegant, it’s probably the most accurate radiometry that NASA has flown,” said CERES Principal Investigator Kory Priestley. “We’re trying to build the next generation of instrument now to meet the same requirements.”

The seventh and final CERES instrument launched aboard NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-1 in November 2017. It has since been activated and first light is expected in January 2018.

For 42 years, NASA has observed Earth’s energy budget. NASA Langley’s Earth Radiation Budget Science Team is the only group producing ERB data globally. Though our understanding of Earth’s energy budget and the technology used to gather data has taken massive strides since Explorer 1 and Nimbus, that understanding is ever-evolving.

“With Earth observations, you never complete your understanding, so you’re always at the mercy of somebody discovering some new things,” Barkstrom said. “If you’re dealing with observational science, you never have that final escape into absolute certainty where you’ll never have to change things.”

Why Measure Earth’s Energy Budget?

According to Barkstrom, attempts to understand the radiation budget started in about 1880. Earth’s energy budget is a metaphor for the delicate equilibrium between energy from the Sun versus energy radiated back into space. Continuous, stable and accurate data records over decades are critical to understanding Earth’s energy balance.

The data collected improve models that provide seasonal and longer-term forecasts, which inform industry and policy makers to better plan for the future.

The Latest

NASA’s Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS)-1 is currently on the International Space Station in a mission to measure the Sun’s energy input to Earth.

Various satellites have captured a continuous record of this solar energy input since 1978. TSIS-1 sensors advance previous measurements, enabling scientists to study the Sun’s natural influence on Earth’s ozone layer, atmospheric circulation, clouds and ecosystems.

These observations are essential for a scientific understanding of the effects of solar variability on the Earth system.

About the Missions: ERBE and CERES

ERBE

The radiation budget represents the balance between incoming energy from the Sun and outgoing thermal (longwave) and reflected (shortwave) energy from the Earth. In the 1970s, NASA recognized the importance of improving our understanding of the radiation budget and its effects on Earth’s climate. Langley Research Center was charged with developing a new generation of instrumentation to make accurate regional and global measurements of the components of the radiation budget. The Goddard Space Flight Center built the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) on which the first Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) instruments were launched by the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984. ERBE instruments were also launched on two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather monitoring satellites, NOAA 9 and NOAA 10, in 1984 and 1986.

CERES

The Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) experiment is one of the highest priority scientific satellite instruments developed for NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS). The first CERES instrument was launched in December 1997 aboard NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), CERES instruments are collecting observations on three separate satellite missions, including the EOS Terra and Aqua observatories, the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) observatory, and soon, the Joint Polar Satellite System, a partnership between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In fall 2017, CERES FM6 launched on JPSS-1, becoming the last in a generation of successful CERES instruments that help us to better observe and study Earth’s interconnected natural systems with long-term data records.

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The Sky Belongs to All of Us

By Hashima Hasan

How did a little girl born in India soon after its independence from the British Empire, become a program scientist for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and the first female program scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), Gravity Probe B, and other astrophysics flight missions?

The story starts in October 1957, when I was 7 years old, and my grandmother ordered the entire family, including my 3-year-old sister, all the servants and their families, to collect at dawn in the backyard of the home and watch Sputnik pass by the clear night skies of Lucknow.

That morning, as I saw Sputnik and the dark, starry sky, I dreamt the impossible dream that one day I would be a space scientist. The path was not easy. With determination and encouragement from my mother and school teachers, I forged ahead, won a scholarship to the University of Oxford, from where I earned a doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics in 1976. The path to a traditional academic career for a female scientist was fraught with challenges, exacerbated by social pressures. After pursuing post-doctoral research, a university faculty position, crisscrossing three continents and making a home across the Atlantic three times, I found myself again on the shores of the U.S. (1985) ― this time with a husband and two infant sons.

My research career had oscillated between nuclear physics and environmental science, preparing me for yet another scientific challenge, when I was offered a research position at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, to write the software to simulate the optics of NASA’s newest (now legendary) telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope and its science instruments. I boldly accepted the job, and under the guidance of Dr. Christopher Burrows, wrote the Telescope Image Modeling (TIM) software.

Little did we know that after the launch of Hubble, TIM would be instrumental in our analysis of the first images, the identification and characterization of the spherical aberration, monitoring the focus of the telescope, and image simulations to enable scientists to analyze their aberrated data.

I was appointed as the Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA) scientist, and have the dubious distinction of being the first and only OTA scientist whose task was to keep the Hubble “in focus” until a fix could be designed. I regularly monitored the images to learn about the health of the telescope optics, degradation of filters in the Faint Object Camera, and image characteristics. The flaw in the primary mirror caused by shaving off glass from its edges no thicker than about a human hair, not only caused blurry images, but had a dramatic effect when there were minute movements of the mirror. We learned that the graphite epoxy truss that supported the primary and secondary mirrors, desorbed water faster and longer than calculations had predicted, causing minute shrinkage in the truss. This meant that approximately every 3 months the mirror had to be moved to bring it back to the “best focus” established by the science community. I also participated in the design and optical testing phase of the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR). During the first servicing mission, I did a final image analysis and focusing the telescope before COSTAR was deployed. I had been allowed three attempts to focus the telescope, but I achieved it in one attempt and COSTAR was deployed ahead of schedule. The following 2 years, I continued to work on the Hubble optics, a concept for an Advanced Camera for the Hubble, and astronomical research on barred galaxies.

I am proud to be a part of the NASA team that turned adversity to victory. The story of Hubble is a tribute to NASA’s “can do” attitude. The entire scientific, technology and human space flight community rallied around Hubble in the true “Explore as One” spirit to fix Hubble. The brave astronauts, who undertook the life-threatening job of servicing Hubble five times, helped make the observatory what it is today.

In 1994, I was ready for a new challenge and accepted a job as visiting senior scientist at NASA Headquarters, under the wing of the fabled, Dr. Edward Weiler. Under his tutelage, I rapidly learned how to manage flight missions and research programs, lead community working groups, strategic planning, international negotiations, and other skills. By 1999, I had achieved sufficient skills and experience to be appointed as a civil servant. During my 23 years at NASA, there have been numerous memorable moments. I would like to mention some.

In 1999, I was appointed as the program scientist for the Hubble, a position that I held till 2004. I provided scientific oversight to the science instruments, Wide Field Camera 3, and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), taking strategic decisions to enable development within cost and schedule. I participated in two servicing missions, SM3A and SM3B.

My involvement with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started in 1995, when it was a mere concept referred to as the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), and Ed Weiler asked me to send a research grant to John Mather at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to study the concept for NGST. I was appointed NGST program scientist from 1999-2001 (and JWST program scientist from 2011-2015), and led the solicitation and selection of early technology development. I led the appointment of an Interim Science Working Group to develop the science requirement for NGST science instruments, and wrote the solicitation for the science instruments and Science Working Group. A particularly contentious negotiation we went through with our partners, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), was the partnership on the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), ended amicably. Much negotiation was held with our partners, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), concerning the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI).

I developed a strategy for selecting a NASA center for management of the MIRI instrument. We were conducting a review of proposals for MIRI management on the fateful day, Sept. 11, 2001. Again, we did not let adversity stop us, and today MIRI and all the other science instruments are installed on JWST. Lessons learned from Hubble development have been applied to JWST development, including complete optical testing in a specially modified chamber at Johnson Space Center (JSC). The building of JWST is another example of “Explore as One,” where scientists, engineers, private industry and non-U.S. space agencies have come together with the ambitious goal of learning how the first stars and galaxies were born.

I would like all readers to follow their dreams as I have and not to get discouraged, as we continue exploring the Universe. The sky belongs to all of us, and NASA’s tremendous scientific journey can be followed through our space missions on  https://science.nasa.gov/.

About the Author

• Hashima Hasan

  Hashima Hasan is the NASA program scientist for the Keck Observatory, the SOFIA mission, ADCAR and is deputy program scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. She also serves as the education lead for Astrophysics. Dr. Hasan has been the program scientist for many NASA missions, and from 2001-2006, she served as the lead for Astronomy and Physics Research and Analysis programs. Dr. Hasan received Her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, U.K., in theoretical nuclear physics. She was the optical telescope assembly scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, until 1994, when she joined NASA Headquarters.

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Measuring the Big Bang with the COBE satellite

By John Mather

The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) went up on a Delta rocket on Nov. 18, 1989, into a polar sun-synchronous orbit 900 km up. Our team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Ball Aerospace, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and universities built it to look at the cosmic microwave and infrared background light that comes to us from the distant universe, so far away that it seems to be a nearly uniform glow. With it, we started the new subject of precision cosmology; before the COBE very little was known except the general idea of an expanding universe, misnamed the Big Bang. (It’s misnamed because the name conjures up the image of a firecracker, happening at a place and a time. Astronomers see an infinite universe expanding into itself, with no center, no edge and no first moment.)

Our team measured the spectrum of the cosmic heat ― more precisely the cosmic microwave background radiation― left over from times when the universe was compressed and hot, with a precision of 50 parts per million. The prediction was for a nearly perfect blackbody spectrum, and it matched. No other story of the universe was ever able to explain that. We also found the hot and cold spots of the heat radiation, known as anisotropy (Greek for not the same in every direction). Stephen Hawking said that was the most important scientific discovery of the century, if not of all time.

Now we know that: a.) the spots are responsible for our existence, because gravity acting on the regions of higher density was able to stop the matter from expanding; b.) most of the spots are caused by dark matter; and c.) if we ever know what made the spots, we might understand quantum gravity. In 2006, I got a call from Stockholm, and the Nobel Prize in Physics went to me and to George Smoot in recognition of the work of our team. Now the entire world knows what we know: it was really important.

We started in 1974, just 5 years after the first Apollo landing on the Moon, when NASA announced opportunities to propose new satellite missions. I had just finished my thesis project in January and taken a job with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City to become a radio astronomer. My thesis project at the University of California, Berkeley, was intended to measure that cosmic background radiation, but it failed to function properly. Yet only months after my arrival in New York, NASA announced the opportunity. My advisor Pat Thaddeus knew what to do: call up our friends and write a proposal. (One of those friends is Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was also working on gravitational wave detection. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize for detecting gravitational waves from merging black holes.)

I never expected our proposal to be chosen, but it was, thanks to far-seeing people at Headquarters like Nancy Boggess, and NASA created a new science team including people from two competing teams. Anticipating that choice, Mike Hauser recruited me to Goddard in Greenbelt, Maryland, and I was hoping to become the lead scientist. Soon Goddard assigned a brilliant team of engineers, who were just completing the IUE observatory, to help us along. We built up a team that eventually included 1,500 contributors, including a science team of 19 spread around the country.

The project was extraordinarily challenging, and became the largest in-house project Goddard has ever done. We brought the work in, because we were pushing so far beyond known engineering that it was impossible to write a contract specification; I spent much of my life in the offices of engineers seeking approaches to doing the impossible. I trusted my future to them, and they to me. In the end, our mission worked beautifully, after many changes, including a redesign after the Challenger loss made it clear we would not be launched on the shuttle.

NASA and its partner agencies like the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency are the only places in the known universe where space science and space engineering meet so intimately, where engineers build what has never been built before, so scientists may discover what has never been known before. I can only marvel at the works we have done, and imagine what we may yet do together.

About the Author

• John C. Mather

  John C. Mather is a senior astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). His research centers on infrared astronomy and cosmology. As an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York City, he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (1974-1976), and came to GSFC to be the study scientist (1976-1988), project scientist (1988-1998), and also the principal investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE. As senior project scientist (1995-present) for the James Webb Space Telescope, Dr. Mather leads the science team and represents scientific interests within the project management. He has received many awards including the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for his precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation using the COBE satellite.

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