Assessment of the Usefulness and Availability of NASA's Earth and Space Science Mission Data (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
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The end product of each mission knowledge—must be the key factor in determining mission design and budget allocations. AVAILABILITY AND USEFULNESS OF NASA'S SPACE MISSION DATA The Task Group on the Usefulness and Availability of NASA's Space Mission Data was charged by NASA's associate administrators for earth science and space science to evaluate the availability, accessibility, and usefulness of data from earth and space science missions, and to assess whether the balance between attention to mission planning and implementation versus data analysis and utilization is appropriate.
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archives from NASA 's science missions as resources in support of high priority scientific studies in each Enterprise [i. e., NASA 's Earth Science Enterprise anci Space Science EnterpriseJ?
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However, in view of the expected growth and diversification in the data products from future missions, NASA should address more explicitly the issues of balance in its planning and management of missions and programs and it should do so utilizing mechanisms that involve the user communities. Trade-offs within the life-cycle budget should be made in such a way as to optimize the overall scientific return, even if that means reducing mission capabilities for data acquisition.
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In parallel with the title of ClO in industry, this person might appropriately be called the chief science information officerks) (CSTO; this title distinguishes the functions addressed here from those of the chief information officer at NASA, who is primarily responsible for NASA business systems and security)
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Ground and flight systems should be clesigned in conjunction in order to achieve cost-effective data acquisition and analysis. Recent program solicitations from both the Earth Science and Space Science Enterprises require the PIs to prepare budgets for the total mission cycle cost from mission definition to data processing, publication, and archiving.
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Even if adequate resources can be found, transferring petabytes of data from those familiar with them to organizations with little knowledge of the data entails a risk. Because NASA data sets are a national resource and because the value of many of them increases in direct proportion to the time interval covered by them, it is important to preserve the data indefinitely.
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NASA should encourage efforts by the scientific community to develop plans for federations of data centers and services that would enable complex querying, mining, and merging of data from different instruments and missions in order to answer complex, large-scale scientific questions. The National Virtual Observatory, an astrophysics project funded recently by the National Science Foundation (NSF)
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should include provisions for rapid prototyping and an evolutionary and distributed approach to implementing new capabilities, with priorities established by the scientific and other user communities. USERS OF NASA DATA NASA currently regards scientists as the end users of data from its missions.
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However, doing so will require a new emphasis on software management; rigorous review of the balance between investments in software and hardware to optimize the science return from both individual missions and suites of missions; and development of new techniques for exploring and intercomparing data contained in a distributed system of active archives, data centers, and data services located both in the United States and abroad.
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