National Aeronautics and Space Administration
US federal civilian space agency, established October 1958 under the National Aeronautics and Space Act, headquartered in Washington DC. Operates Earth observation missions through 20 field centres, primarily Goddard Space Flight Center (Terra, Aqua, GEDI, Landsat 8/9 space segment) for forestry-relevant work. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL, separate EO-Atlas slug nasa-jpl) handles distinct radar and OPERA programmes. NASA is not a commercial manufacturer; for hardware-builder FKs see Ball Aerospace (acquired by BAE Systems 2023) on OLI and OLI-2.
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is the United States' independent federal space agency, established 1 October 1958 under the National Aeronautics and Space Act. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it operates through six mission directorates; Earth observation programs fall under the Science Mission Directorate's Earth Science Division, which manages a fleet of more than 20 satellites in orbit as of 2026.[^nasa-earth-science]
NASA's largest EO partnership is with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS): the two agencies jointly manage the Landsat program. NASA funds and builds spacecraft while USGS operates the satellites and archives data at the EROS Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Landsat 8 (launched 2013) and Landsat 9 (launched 2021) are the current operational pair, providing 30-meter multispectral coverage with an eight-day repeat cycle when combined.[^landsat-program] Data access is free and open, a policy formalised in 2008.
NASA developed MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), flying on Terra (1999) and Aqua (2002), which established the daily global surface observation record still used for land cover, fire, sea surface temperature, and aerosol products. VIIRS, the follow-on instrument, flies on the joint NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP mission and the operational NOAA JPSS series (NOAA-20, NOAA-21), continuing this observational record.[^terra-mission][^aqua-mission]
On the International Space Station, NASA operates three EO instruments: GEDI (Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, 2018), a lidar measuring forest canopy height and biomass; ECOSTRESS (2018), a thermal radiometer detecting plant water stress at field scale; and EMIT (2022), an imaging spectrometer mapping surface mineral composition in arid regions and detecting methane and carbon dioxide point sources.[^gedi-overview]
The Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel (HLS) product, developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and produced at Marshall Space Flight Center, combines Landsat 8/9 and ESA Sentinel-2 observations into a unified 30-meter analysis-ready surface reflectance time series with approximately 1.4-day global revisit.[^hls-gsfc]
NASA co-operates the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite (launched 2020) in partnership with ESA, EUMETSAT, CNES, NOAA, and the European Commission for continuous sea-level monitoring; Sentinel-6B launched in November 2025. NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), launched 30 July 2025, is a dual-frequency L- and S-band SAR developed jointly with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), with data archived at the Alaska Satellite Facility DAAC.[^nisar-mission]
Gravitational field observations come from the GRACE-FO mission (launched 2018), a partnership between NASA and GFZ (German Research Centre for Geosciences, Helmholtz Association), which measures water mass redistribution including groundwater, ice sheets, and sea level change. SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive, 2015) provides global soil moisture and freeze/thaw maps via its L-band radiometer. ICESat-2 (2018) carries the ATLAS photon-counting lidar for ice sheet, glacier, and land elevation monitoring.[^smap-mission][^grace-fo]
NASA distributes all Earth observation data openly and at no cost through EOSDIS, a network of twelve Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) hosted at partner institutions. Key archives include LP DAAC (land processes, operated jointly with USGS; >14 petabytes), PO.DAAC at JPL (physical oceanography), ASF DAAC at the University of Alaska (SAR), and LAADS DAAC at GSFC (MODIS and VIIRS global products).[^daacs]
NASA-JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) is catalogued as a separate EO-Atlas entity (slug: nasa-jpl). JPL is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) under a NASA contract. It designs and operates several NASA EO missions, including ECOSTRESS, EMIT, SMAP, GRACE-FO, and Sentinel-6 data products, but is not a NASA organisational unit.