NASA plans to obtain additional data under customary scientific use licenses. That means NASA is unable to purchase as much data as it could with more restrictive licenses
Fremont, CA: Program Executive for NASA's Earth Science Data System, Kevin Murphy, said that NASA would continue to buy Earth observation data collected by commercial satellite constellations as a result of a pilot program.
If the information collected will be of sufficient quality and utility, NASA will try to obtain more data from the Planet and Maxar satellites, Murphy said on Dec 10 at the American Geophysical Union Conference. The space agency is continuously evaluating the Spire Global data.
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NASA has announced its plans to purchase Earth science data from Planet, Maxar, and Spire earlier in 2018. The space agency directed the principal investigators to assess the value of data and imagery for advancing Earth system science research.
Essential questions were, "Can we do new stuff? Or can we do the stuff we already do better with this information," Murphy said.
The imagery and data were helpful, but warning licenses were a sticking point. The data obtained by NASA under the pilot program was through scientific case licenses with limitations on publication.
"Standard scientific collaborations were inhibited by the license agreement," Murphy said. "Being able to share information and collaborate is highly important."
NASA plans to obtain additional data under customary scientific use licenses. That means NASA is unable to purchase as much data as it could with more restrictive permissions, but the transformation is "necessary both for our ability to manage the interactions with principal investigators and their expectations," Murphy said.
The Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition program of NASA may bring additional vendors into the process.
"We're going to offer opportunities to on-ramp new vendors continuously," Murphy said. "This will happen every year to year and a half."
Apart from Maxar, Planet, and Spire, Teledyne Brown Engineering is providing Earth imagery and data to NASA from the DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer, a hyperspectral imager mounted on the outer part of the International Space Station.
"We've agreed in the last week or so that we're going to have unlimited access to those products for a period about a year and a half, including about 50 percent of the tasking capability," Murphy said.
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