NASA Turns to the Cloud for Help With Next-Generation Earth Missions

These satellites will also produce a deluge of data that has engineers and scientists setting up systems in the cloud capable of processing, storing, and analyzing all of that digital information.

"About five or six years ago, there was a realization that future Earth missions were going to be generating a huge volume of data and that the systems we were using would become inadequate very quickly," said Suresh Vannan, manager of the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The center is one of several under NASA's Earth Science Data Systems program responsible for processing, archiving, documenting, and distributing data from the agency's Earth-observing satellites and field projects.

The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, part of the U.S.-European Sentinel-6/Jason-CS mission, is the first NASA satellite to utilize this cloud system, although the amount of data the spacecraft sends back isn't as large as the data many future satellites will return.

NASA's current Earth science data archive is around 40 petabyes, but by 2025 - a couple of years after SWOT and NISAR are launched - the archive is expected to hold more than 245 petabytes of data.

"NASA is not just working across the agency to facilitate efficient access to a common cloud infrastructure, we're also training the science community to access, analyze, and use that data."

Faster Downloads Currently, Earth science satellites send data back to ground stations where engineers turn the raw information from ones and zeroes into measurements that people can use and understand.

Working with data stored in the cloud means scientists won't have to buy huge hard drives to download the data or wait months as numerous large files download to their system.

"We just don't have the additional physical server space at JPL with enough capacity and flexibility to support both NISAR and SWOT," said Hook Hua, a JPL science data systems architect for both missions.

NASA engineers have already taken advantage of this aspect of cloud computing for a proof-of-concept product using data from Sentinel-1.