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Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program

• https://www.planet.com/markets/nasa/

• https://earthdata.nasa.gov/esds/csdap

The Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program was established to identify, evaluate, and acquire data from commercial sources that support NASA's Earth science research and application goals. NASA's Earth Science Division (ESD) recognizes the potential impact commercial small-satellite (smallsat) constellations may have in encouraging/enabling efficient approaches to advancing Earth System Science and applications development for societal benefit.

Commercially acquired data may also provide a cost-effective means to augment and/or complement the suite of Earth observations acquired by NASA and other U.S. government agencies and those by international partners and agencies. Going forward, NASA-funded researchers will be able to request access to the data from the commercial small satellite vendors. NASA will maintain the archive of data purchased from the vendors. Information about these vendors and data is available on the Commercial Datasets page.

CSDA was initiated in 2017 with the Private-Sector Small Constellation Satellite Data Product Pilot Project.

Strategic Objectives

The objectives of the CSDA program are to:

Establish continuous and repeatable processes to onramp new commercial data vendors and evaluate data for its potential to advance NASA's Earth science research and applications activities.

Enable the sustained use of purchased data for broader use and dissemination by NASA scientific community.

Ensure long-term data preservation through the establishment of data management processes and systems to support rapid evaluation, access and distribution of purchased data, and long-term access to purchased data for scientific reproducibility.

Coordinate evaluation and scientific use with the European Space Agency (ESA).

Commercial Data

The scientific community may use commercial datasets that are acquired by NASA for scientific purposes in adherence to vendor-specific terms and conditions. Currently, data acquired during the evaluations of Planet, Maxar, and Spire Global are available at no cost to NASA-funded researchers. Through NASA ESD’s collaboration with the International Space Station (ISS), data from the Teledyne Brown Engineering, Inc., DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer (DESIS) is also available for all US government-funded researchers.

Information about these vendors and data is available on the Commercial Datasets page. As additional commercial small satellite datasets are evaluated and acquired, those datasets will also be made available.

Going Forward

As the capabilities of commercial satellite vendors grow, NASA's Earth Sciences Division (ESD) will continuously monitor the development of these companies and acquire relevant data to complement NASA's Earth observation data.

Data that is favorably evaluated and deemed of sufficient value will be purchased by NASA for broader sustained use. Contract types will be selected on a vendor-by-vendor basis that are best suited to provide long-term access to data.

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