Alaska Satellite Facility

The Alaska Satellite Facility is a data processing facility and satellite-tracking ground station within the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The facility’s mission is to make remote-sensing data accessible Its work is central to polar processes research including wetlands, glaciers,sea ice,climate change, permafrost, flooding and land cover such as changes in the Amazon rainforest.

The Alaska Satellite Facility began as a single-purpose receiving station known as the Alaska Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Facility located in the Geophysical Institute (GI) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The interest in space-borne SAR observations began in the U.S. with the success of the Seasat mission in 1978. (There is information below under "Data Center" about the facility's 2013 release of newly processed Seasat SAR data.) After Seasat’s premature demise, scientists from the federally funded Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Geophysical Institute developed the concept of a ground station in Fairbanks, Alaska, to receive data from foreign satellites.

In 1986, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory requested and approved a quotation for the integration of a receiving ground station, the Alaska SAR Facility, at UAF. The Alaska SAR Facility was marked at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 24, 1991. Later that year, the facility began down-linking European Remote Sensing Satellite-1 (ERS-1) data. The expected data volume for the station was 45 minutes total from ERS-1, JERS-1 and RADARSAT. In the operations stage, data flow rapidly increased due to changing requirements from flight agencies and government sponsors, and storage of online data and demand for SAR data was expected to rapidly exceed capacity. The Satellite-Tracking Ground Station launched in 1990, and in 1994 a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between NASA and UAF formed the ASF Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC). The facility was renamed the Alaska Satellite Facility in 2003.

The ASF DAAC is one of 12 DAACs funded by NASA to support earth observations from ground-based, in-situ, airborne, and space borne sensors. The ASF DAAC processes, distributes, and archives data products as assigned by NASA. The ASF DAAC archive now offers more than a dozen synthetic aperture radar (SAR) datasets. Tasking and missions have been added or deleted from the MOA when deemed appropriate by NASA program managers, Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) personnel, and ASF management.

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