Programmatic Update for NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program

Abstract

Established in 2017 as a pilot project, the NASA Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program evaluates and acquires commercial datasets that compliment NASA Earth Science research and application goals. The success of the pilot and recognition of the value commercial data provide to the scientific community led to establishment of a sustained program within NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD) with objectives of providing continuous on-ramp of new commercial vendors to evaluate the potential to advance NASA’s Earth science research and application activities, enable sustained use of the purchased data by the scientific community, ensure long-term preservation of purchased data for scientific reproducibility, and coordinate with other U.S. Government agencies and international partners on the evaluation and use of commercial data. This presentation will focus on data made available for scientific use through the CSDA Program, especially those datasets added since the conclusion of the original pilot project, describe the process for end users to access of CSDA managed datasets, and provide a status overview of ongoing and upcoming vendor evaluation activities will be given. Recent scientific research results from CSDA subject matter experts utilizing commercial data will also be provided.