Accelerating Applications for Planned NASA Satellite Missions: A New Paradigm of Virtual Hackathons during a Pandemic and in the Post-Pandemic Era

While the primary mission of NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD) is to develop a scientific understanding of the Earth System and how it is responding to human and natural drivers of change, an implicit need is also to understand how best to promote the use of NASA satellite mission products and information for application activities that directly benefit society and our environment. In fact, the 2018 National Academies on Science, Engineering and Medicine Decadal Survey for NASA, “Thriving on Our Changing Planet: A Decadal Strategy for Earth Observations from Space,” clearly underscores the tremendous value of satellite mission data, which “enabled societal applications that provide tremendous value to individuals, businesses, the nation, and the world. Such applications are growing in breadth and depth, becoming an essential information infrastructure element for society as they are integrated into people’s daily lives (NASEM, 2018).”The NASA Applied Sciences Program (ASP) was set up to empower people around the world to use NASA satellite data to solve relevant problems by providing support and funding to institutions and individuals to make better decisions. To maximize the value of satellite data for planned missions, NASA ASP has developed a pre-launch protocol called the Early Adopter Program (EAP) for engaging with the broader user community (Brown and Escobar, 2019). In the vision of the EAP, each selected EA proposes an activity for the use of planned satellite data using either proxy datasets or simulated data that mimics the anticipated mission during the post-launch era. EAs are defined as those groups and individuals who will have a potential or clearly defined need for data from the planned mission, and who are planning to apply their own resources to demonstrate the utility of planned satellite mission data for their application, system, or model. Experience from recently-launched satellite missions such as Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) has shown that the sooner this pre-launch engagement begins and is sustained, the better are the outcomes on the use of mission data beyond the declared goals of scientific query and data generation (Escobar et al., 2016).