The Joint ESA-NASA Multi-Mission Analysis Platform: helping to enable international collaboration in the terrestrial biomass scientific community

The scientific community is facing a unique and immediate need for improved data sharing and collaboration in order to best use the abundance of information provided by new satellite missions to increase our understanding of complex ecological processes. This need is evident in the Earth sciences and carbon monitoring community with the anticipated launches of the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission, the NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission, and the ESA BIOMASS mission. These missions will produce large quantities of data (mission as well as pre-launch airborne, field, and calibration/validation data) and analyses and thus present data storing, processing and sharing challenges which can impede scientific progress. NASA and ESA are working collaboratively to develop the Joint ESA-NASA Multi-Mission Analysis Platform (MAP) which will improve the understanding of global aboveground terrestrial carbon dynamics. The MAP will provide a common platform where computing capabilities are co-located with data and a set of tools and algorithms developed specifically to support this field of research is provided. The MAP will also establish a collaboration framework between ESA and NASA to share data, science algorithms and compute resources in order to foster and accelerate scientific research.

The objectives of the MAP are to:

- enable researchers to easily discover, process, analyze and visualize large volumes of ESA and NASA satellite data

- project data from a variety of sources in the same coordinate reference frame to enable comparison, analysis, data evaluation, and data generation

- provide a version-controlled science algorithm development environment that supports co-located data, tools, and processing resources

- address intellectual property and sharing issues related to collaborative algorithm development and the sharing of data and algorithms.

This presentation will showcase the MAP to its future user community. It will also discuss the goals and organization of the platform and the international and inter-agency agreements and mechanisms developed to allow open access to data and to foster collaboration between NASA, ESA, and data users.