NASA Worldview: making petabytes of NASA data more searchable and usable

NASA embraces open science. IMPACT works to enable open data for NASA tools such as Worldview which gives users access to over 450 terabytes of satellite imagery. Open data is critical to research. Before embarking on a scientific study related to particular phenomena, such as wildfires, scientists need to collect numerous examples of these phenomena. Locating these examples requires searching through 197 million square miles of satellite imagery each day across more than 20 years of data. Such an effort can produce a valuable trove of data, but the act of manually searching the data is cumbersome and laborious. Making large amounts of data more discoverable and usable for specific parameter extraction is a hard problem. A question such as “Can we use new techniques, such as self-supervised learning, to tackle our data discovery problem?”