NASA honors Alaska Satellite Facility for SAR work
The Alaska Satellite Facility has received one of NASA’s highest national honors for work in advancing the accessibility of synthetic aperture radar data to users worldwide. The award adds to NASA’s continuing recognition of the services ASF provides the nation.
The Alaska Satellite Facility received the 2021 NASA Group Achievement Award, given collectively to NASA’s 12 Distributed Active Archive Centers for “outstanding group accomplishment that has contributed substantially to NASA's mission.”
One of the Alaska Satellite Facility's dishes on the UAF West Ridge.
NASA made the announcement earlier this month. The award is among several agency honors approved by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and presented to individuals and groups of individuals, both government and non-government, “who have distinguished themselves by making outstanding contributions to the agency's mission.”
The Alaska Satellite Facility has received numerous honors over the years, including NASA Group Achievement Awards to its SMAP Science Data System Team, ALOS TDRS, Alaska Ground Station Early Operations Team, Antarctic Mapping Mission Team, EOSDIS Data Centers Customer Support Team and to the ASF DAAC.
Interim ASF Director Wade Albright said the award to the ASF staff resulted from years of work.
“Since 2015 ASF has been creating innovative solutions to ingesting, archiving and distributing Earth science data products in the cloud. ASF manages an archive in excess of 13 petabytes and distributes an average of more than 2 petabytes of data per month to the science community.
“ASF has created solutions for limiting NASA's risk of uncapped costs while providing free and open data to the global science community,” he said. “ASF's search and discovery interface, Vertex, has set the gold standard for discovering synthetic aperture radar imagery, and for the past seven years ASF has consistently improved its customer satisfaction index score, which is now among the highest of all the DAACs.”
Drew Kittel, science operations manager of NASA Goddard’s Earth Science Data and Information System Project, congratulated the ASF staff for their part in the award given to the Distributed Active Archive Centers. ESDIS uses ASF and other Distributed Active Archive Centers to process, archive, distribute and provide stewardship of data obtained from NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System missions and instruments.
“Congratulations to the team for their dedication, leadership, passion for excellence and their many accomplishments in fulfilling the mission, goals and objectives of NASA, ESDS, EOSDIS and ESDIS,” he wrote.