TOOLS TO SUPPORT THE REUSE OF SOFTWARE ASSETS FOR THE NASA EARTH SCIENCE DECADAL SURVEY MISSIONS

The future Earth science missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) promise to provide an explosion of data and a platform for science that previously was unachievable using existing hardware, software, and assets. Instrument resolution is increasing, as is the ability of software and hardware to deal with data volumes that will easily grow to the 10–100 petabyte range in the next five years [1]. Over the past twenty years, NASA has invested in software to support all phases of the Earth science mission pipeline. These investments include components and architectures that support science data processing at Science Investigator-led Processing Systems (SIPS), data archival and dissemination at the Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs), and ad-hoc data analyses and custom product generation using DAAC-provided data [2]. This general flow is shown in Fig. 1.