NASA-funded Principal investigators (PIs) from all six Earth Science Division (ESD) Research and Analysis (R&A) interdisciplinary science focus areas, Earth Action program elements, and the Heliophysics Space Weather program examined and analyzed commercial datasets to help determine their utility for advancing NASA's science and applications development goals during the Pilot program.

Less than a third of the Pilot PIs evaluated multiple vendors for their projects. Spire data evaluation was largely performed orthogonally to the Planet and Maxar Technologies segments, because the latter were focused on imagery from instruments aboard space-based platforms.

In addition, the Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition (CSDA) program funded two research teams specializing in instrument calibration and validation to independently assess the radiometric calibration and geolocation accuracy of vendor-provided multispectral imagery.

Listed on this page are the high level summaries and the PIs responsible for the research, organized by vendor data used.

• Research using Planet data
• Research using Maxar Technologies data
• Research using Spire data
• Research using Planet and Maxar Technologies data
• Research using Maxar Technologies, Planet, and Spire data
• Calibration and geolocation assessments

Research using Planet data

• Assessing Planet Imagery for the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE). (PDF) Elizabeth Hoy, SSAI/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
• Monitoring and Projecting Environmental Change in Fragmented Tropical Forest Landscapes. (PDF) Michael Wimberly, University of Oklahoma.
• Feasibility of Planet data for Rapid Disaster Response. (PDF) Batuhan Osmanoglu, Goddard.
• Exploring the Use of Planet Data for Monitoring High Resolution Forest Disturbance. (PDF) Laura Duncanson, University of Maryland.
• Evaluation of the Potential to Use Commercial High-Resolution Multispectral Imagery for Monitoring Small Water Bodies in West Africa. (PDF) Ashutosh Limaye, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
• Potential Air Quality Application of Planet Data. (PDF) Tracey Holloway, University of Wisconsin.
• Mapping the Missing Millions: Developing a global database of informal settlement location, schema, and SDG indicators. (PDF) Jamon Van Den Hoek, Oregon State University.
• Burnt Area Mapping in South/Southeast Asia using Multi-Satellite and Very High Resolution Planet data. (PDF) Krishna Vadrevu, NASA Marshall.
• Controls on Iceberg Distribution Around Greenland. (PDF) Leigh Stearns, University of Kansas.
• Tropical Glacier Area Mapping: Comparison for Landsat-8, PlanetScope and RapidEye. (PDF) Compton Tucker, NASA Goddard.
• Assessment of High Resolution PlanetScope Imagery for Aerosol Remote Sensing Applications. (PDF) Jaehwa Lee, NASA Goddard.
• Assessing Crop Type, Extent, Production and Forest Disturbance in Asia and Africa. (PDF) Matthew Hansen, University of Maryland.
• Comparison of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) derived from MODIS and PlanetScope. (PDF) Compton Tucker, NASA Goddard.
• Meltwater on the Greenland Ice Sheet during a Record Melt Season. (PDF) Rajashree Tri Datta, NASA Goddard.
• Evaluation of PlanetScope imagery for global DEM generation. (PDF) M. J. Noh, Ohio State University.

Research using Maxar Technologies data

• Evaluation of Commercial Satellite Data for Essential Water Variables: Snow Cover Fraction and Annual Minimum Snow and Ice Extent. (PDF) Karl Rittger, University of Colorado.
• Precipitation and Glacier Change in High Mountain Asia Over the Modern Era. (PDF) Summer Rupper, University of Utah.
• Evaluation of Commercial Satellite Data Products for Cloud Remote Sensing. (PDF) Kerry Meyer, NASA Goddard.
• Evaluation of Commercial Satellite Observations for Coastal Ecosystem Science Studies. (PDF) Dirk Aurin, NASA Goddard.

Research using Spire data

• The Use of Spire Radio Occultation Measurements in the GEOS Atmospheric Data Assimilation System. (PDF) Will McCarty, Global Modeling and Assimilation Office/NASA Goddard.
• Data Processing and Scientific Evaluation of Spire GNSS RO Data for the NASA Commercial Data Buy Program. (PDF) Bill Schreiner, UCAR COSMIC Program.
• Phase-Delay Altimetry from Reflected GNSS Signals for Resolving Mesoscale Ocean Circulation Features. (PDF) R. Steven Nerem, University of Colorado.
• Spire POD/Neutral Density Assessment. (PDF) Eric Sutton, Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center/University of Colorado.

Research using Planet and Maxar Technologies data

• Augmentation to Disaster Response and Coordination Activities at Marshall Space Flight Center to Support NASA Commercial Data Buy Pilot. (PDF) Andrew Molthan, NASA Marshall.
• Evaluation of Commercial High-Resolution Satellite Imagery for Coral Reef Ecology. (PDF) Eric Hochberg, Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences.
• Distribution and abundance of pelagic Sargassum and their linkage with environmental changes in the Intra-Americas Sea and Tropical Atlantic: an interdisciplinary assessment. (PDF) Chuanmin Hu, University of South Florida.
• Multi-sensor geohazard assessment along key transportation corridors in high mountain Nepal. (PDF) Dalia Kirschbaum, NASA Goddard.
• Prototyping Multi-Source Land Imaging Canopy Chlorophyll for the Assessment of Vegetation Function and Productivity – Evaluation of High Resolution Commercial Data. (PDF) Petya Campbell, University of Maryland, Baltimore County/NASA Goddard.
• NASA NeMO-Net – The Neural Multimodal Observation & Training Network for Global Coral Reef Mapping. (PDF).
• High Spatial Resolution, Commercial Satellite Data Applied to the Study of LCLUC on Islands. (PDF) Stephen Walsh, University of North Carolina.
• Land-cover/land-use change in southern Vietnam through the lenses of conflict, religion, and politics, 1980s to present - augmentation to evaluate commercial remote sensing data. (PDF) Jessica McCarty, Miami University.
• Environmental Determinants of Enteric Infectious Disease: a GEO Platform for Analysis and Risk Assessment—Commercial Data Supplementary. (PDF) Benjamin Zaitchik, Johns Hopkins University.
• Africa burned area product generation, quality assessment and validation – demonstrating a Multi-Source Land Imaging (MuSLI) Landsat-8 Sentinel-2 capability. (PDF) David Roy, Michigan State University.
• Commercial Imagery for Water Quality. (PDF) Blake Schaeffer, Environmental Protection Agency.
• Stereo2SWE: Regional Snow Depth and SWE from Sub-Meter Optical Satellite Stereo DEMs. (PDF) David Shean, University of Washington.
• Quantification of Blue Carbon Burial in Seagrass Ecosystems. (PDF) Richard Zimmerman, Old Dominion University.
• Combined use of VHR WorldView-2/3 and Planet datasets for agricultural monitoring. (PDF) Sergii Skakun, University of Maryland.

Research using Maxar Technologies, Planet, and Spire data

• Integration of Altimeter Data from ICESat, IceBridge, CyroSat-2 and ICESat-2: Mathematical Approaches and Applications to Glacial Change. (PDF) Ute Herzfeld, University of Colorado.

Calibration and geolocation assessments

• Evaluate the calibration of Dove and Dove-R (VHR) satellite data from the Planet constellation. (PDF) Eric Vermote, NASA Goddard.
• PlanetScope Imagery Geolocation Accuracy Assessment. (PDF) Robert Wolfe, NASA Goddard.
• Calibration Trend Analysis of DigitalGlobe Imagers. (PDF) Alexei Lyapustin, NASA Goddard.