NASA's Earth science program—increasing science opportunity and payoff through small satellites

Abstract

By now it is well known that small satellites are the future for NASA's Space and Earth Science missions as we implement the Administrator's challenge for “better/faster/cheaper” missions. Though the Earth Science Enterprise is motivated to reduce overall program costs there are several other driving factors. First, the desire for more frequent science missions. Typically, with each mission scientists learn more and desire to refine and even completely refocus efforts based on the new knowledge. Second, the desire to reduce overall program risk by minimizing losses due to launch, spacecraft, or single instrument failures. And, third, the need to exploit the major advances in technology itself-especially in microelectronics, high performance computing, and sophisticated end-to-end information system concepts By objective NASA's Earth Science program must provide long-term data sets of climate-related and geophysical variables. At the same time it must provide for experimental missions to analyze Earth system processes for the first time. Many of these science investigations require that measurements using different remote sensing techniques be made simultaneously. In the past this has resulted in a number of instruments gathered on a single, large platform such as that for EOS AM-1. ESE has accepted the challenge to accomplish these objectives through the use of smaller satellites, highly advanced instrument technologies, and sophisticated operational concepts.