Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project

NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project is a part of NASA's Earth Science Projects Division under NASA's Flight Projects Directorate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

ESDIS manages the science systems of NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). EOSDIS provides free and open access to its science data to a wide community of users for NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD). ESDIS' archives hold more than 100PB of data, with 300TB of data distributed every day, reaching more than 5 million users annually.

ESDIS is responsible for:

• Processing, archiving, and distributing Earth science data (land, ocean, atmosphere, cryosphere, human dimensions, solid earth, sun-earth interactions, and terrestrial hydrosphere data products)
  • This includes Earth-observing satellite data, field measurements, near real-time data, model data, imagery, and visualizations
• Providing tools to facilitate the processing, archiving, discovery, and distribution of Earth science data
• Collecting metrics and user satisfaction data to learn how to continue improving services provided to users
• Ensuring scientists and the public have access to data to enable the study of Earth from space to advance Earth system science to meet the challenges of climate and environmental change
• Promoting the interdisciplinary use of EOSDIS data, including data products, data services, and data handling tools to a broad range of existing and potential user communities

ESDIS strategic goals include:

• Migrating existing data to the cloud
  • Data will be available in the AWS commercial cloud, us-west-2 region
  • Data is still fully accessible via traditional HTTPS downloads if the users prefers to maintain their existing workflows
  • Data is also now accessible via S3 application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable cloud native access to the data
• Exploring the migration of product generation processing pipelines to the cloud
• Evolving our architecture to reduce duplication and continually improve our security posture
  • ESDIS will provide a more cohesive offering of ESDIS systems to our end user community by reducing the number of one-off tools with duplicative functionality and instead ensure that the vast majority of NASA’s Earth science data works in our enterprise tooling
  • Given the continually evolving security landscape, ESDIS remains committed to meeting or exceeding security requirements in order to protect NASA’s Earth science data
• Supporting open science by partnering with other organizations, U.S. agencies, and nations to share data and make it easier to integrate for science
  • The ESDIS project recognizes that not all development goals need to be developed internally to be successful
  • In the spirit of Open Source Science, the project should not only be sharing all internally developed tooling, but should transition to a model of contributing to, building upon, and utilizing open source and other externally developed tools and services
  • This will not only reduce costs, but it also reduces the barrier of use for our end user community by ensuring that NASA data works well with externally developed tooling that users are already comfortable with
     

For information on various components within EOSDIS, visit the Science System Description page.