Distributed Active Archive Centers

The Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is a key core capability in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program. It is a comprehensive data and information system designed to perform a wide variety of functions in support of a heterogeneous national and international user community. EOSDIS provides a spectrum of services; some services are intended for a diverse group of casual users while others are intended only for a select cadre of research scientists chosen by NASA's peer-reviewed competitions, and then many fall somewhere in between. The primary services provided by EOSDIS are User Support, Data Archive, Management and Distribution, Information Management, and Product Generation, all of which are managed by the Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project.

EOSDIS ingests, processes, archives, and distributes data from a large number of Earth-observing satellite, and provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA’s Earth science data from various sources – satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and various other programs. For the Earth Observing System (EOS) satellite missions, EOSDIS provides capabilities for command and control, scheduling, data capture and initial (Level 0) processing. These capabilities, constituting the EOSDIS Mission Operations, are managed by the Earth Science Mission Operations (ESMO) Project. NASA network capabilities transport the data to the science operations facilities. EOSDIS consists of a set of processing facilities and Earth Science Data Centers (referred to as Distributed Active Archive Centers, or DAACs) distributed across the United States. These processing facilities and DAACs serve hundreds of thousands of users around the world, providing hundreds of millions of data files each year covering many Earth science disciplines. The EOSDIS project as of September 2012 reported it contained approximately 10 PB of data in its database with ingestion of approximately 8.5 TB daily.

The remaining capabilities of EOSDIS constitute the EOSDIS Science Operations, which are managed by the Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project. These capabilities include: generation of higher level (Level 1-4) science data products for EOS missions; archiving and distribution of data products from EOS and other satellite missions, as well as aircraft and field measurement campaigns. The EOSDIS science operations are performed within a distributed system of many interconnected nodes (Science Investigator-led Processing Systems and distributed, discipline-specific, Earth science data centers) with specific responsibilities for production, archiving, and distribution of Earth science data products. The distributed data centers serve a large and diverse user community (as indicated by EOSDIS performance metrics) by providing capabilities to search and access science data products and specialized services.

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