Earth Science 3: Advanced Technologies

Develop and adopt advanced technologies to enable mission success and serve national priorities.

Other Information:

NASA will improve observational capabilities through the development of small, smart detectors that require less payload space; passive systems with lower energy requirements; designs that allow simpler calibration, integration, and operation; and small self-deploying instrument packages. Strategies to achieve these advances include the Instrument Incubator Program, which competitively selects innovative instrument concepts and sponsors their maturation to the instrument designs of the future. The New Millennium Program identifies, develops, and tests in orbit promising future instrument technologies to verify whether they are ready for full-scaled employment as operational instruments. NASA is pursuing architecture improvements that include intelligent platform and sensor control, better space/ground communications, linking multiple data sets to view the Earth as a system, and increasing the number of data providers and data users in Government and the private sector. A key strategy for achieving NASA’s Earth Science objectives is to forge partnerships with service providers who develop NASA discoveries into new products and services for the Nation. NASA has traditionally pioneered experimental spacecraft and instruments and then turned them over to operational agencies. Perhaps the best example of this is NASA’s long partnership with NOAA. For decades, NASA has developed the Nation’s weather satellite technologies and then transitioned them to NOAA to provide the space-based weather observations used in national forecast models. NASA is now developing instruments for the future converged DOD/NOAA weather satellite system mentioned above. NEAR TERM PLANS: - Implement satellite formation flying to improve science return, and New Millennium Program to validate revolutionary technologies in space - Explore new instrument concepts for next decade missions - Employ high-performance computing to address Earth system modeling challenges - Collaborate with operational agencies in mission planning, development, and operations

Objective(s):

1: Reduced Costs and Increased Capabilities

2: Data Technologies

3: Remote Sensing

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