In June 2024, within the context of an ESA-NASA collaboration in Earth Observation, the official signature of the "ESA-NASA Joint EO Mission Quality Assessment Framework – SAR Guidelines" took place—enriching their ongoing cooperation even further.

In recent years, the expanding range of applications of Earth Observation (EO) data products and availability of low-cost launch services have resulted in a growing number of commercial EO satellite systems (also known as New Space) in many different domains, developed to deliver end-to-end information services.

This evolution in the marketplace has led to increasing interest from space agencies in the acquisition of commercial EO data products, as they may provide complementary capabilities and services to those currently offered for both scientific and operational purposes.

To this end, both ESA and NASA have initiated activities aimed at assessing the quality and utility of such data products, with the aim to potentially acquire EO commercial data products.

On ESA’s side, the Earthnet Data Assessment Project (EDAP) performs early data assessments on EO missions in the optical, atmospheric, synthetic aperture radar and thermal infrared domains, to assess their quality towards a potential integration as Third Party Missions (TPMs), within ESA’s Earthnet programme.

In the meantime, NASA’s Earth Science Division has initiated a Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition Program, completed a pilot study, and entered the sustained use phase for some of the commercial data sets.

To ensure that decisions on acquisition of commercial data can be made with confidence, it is generally acknowledged that there is a need for an objective framework with which to assess the data quality of these commercial sources. With a ground-breaking work, ESA’s EDAP project succeeded in establishing such an EO mission quality assessment framework, which was also later customised for several different sensor domains.

The new ESA-NASA signature and agreement means that the framework is now officially further developed as a collaboration between ESA and NASA, and released in the form of guidelines that are domain-specific (e.g., SAR guidelines, Optical guidelines, etc.).

In particular, the ESA-NASA Joint Programme Planning Group meeting in June 2024, provided such opportunity for the official ESA-NASA signature of the SAR Guidelines. ESA’s Henri Laur (Head of Mission Management and Product Quality Division), and NASA’s Melissa Yang Martin (Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program Manager), signed the guidelines for ESA and NASA respectively.

Following this landmark agreement, Leonardo De Laurentiis, ESA’s VHR data quality manager (who is actively contributing to the coordination and guidelines development between ESA-NASA), said, “The official signature of the Joint Mission Quality Assessment Framework marks a fundamental milestone for our ESA-NASA cooperation on New Space Missions Data Quality Assessments.

“The development and use of joint guidelines on one hand enable the release of a robust approach validated by ESA and NASA, and the generation of harmonised complementary assessment reports on the other. This is a key aspect that enables a further increase in the level of confidence in commercial data acquisitions. Moreover, all the assessment results are made public, giving potential end-users a summary of the validated performances.

“I am very grateful to be part of this joint ESA-NASA cooperation, and I would like to thank and congratulate our ESA-NASA team colleagues, and the EDAP and the CSDA teams for this major achievement, which pave the way for new developments and further successful joint ESA-NASA activities.” It is noteworthy that these ESA-NASA guidelines are meant to be continuously developed with the evolution of the market and the advance of Earth sciences and applications of EO data products, and thus will be continuously revised as appropriate.

The future foresees further official ESA-NASA signatures of consolidated guidelines for other domains, starting from the more consolidated optical guidelines, while more will also follow when further ESA-NASA developments will be complete.

“The growing number of commercial EO missions, increasingly adopting a New Space approach, calls for a robust and homogeneous assessment of the quality of their data. This is the purpose of this precursor activity with NASA, in coordination with the commercial EO missions,” stated Henri Laur, ESA’s Head of Mission Management and Product Quality Division.