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Biomass Harmonization and SAR Analysis with the Multi-mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP)

The Multi‐mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP) is a collaborative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to support above ground biomass (AGB) research in an open science framework. MAAP brings together relevant data, algorithms, and computing capabilities in a common cloud environment to address the challenges of sharing and processing data from field, airborne and satellite measurements. MAAP was publicly released in October 2021, providing computing capabilities co-located with the data, a collaborative coding and analysis environment, and a set of interoperable tools and algorithms developed to support the estimation and visualization of data. MAAP has allowed scientists from both North America and Europe to collaborate on the generation and analysis/visualization of data derived from multiple, discipline-adjacent missions in an open, collaborative environment that has reached beyond traditional scientific investigation. MAAP has been used to support multiple scientific activities. To date, existing LiDAR data from multiple platforms has been calibrated with field measurements and combined for more comprehensive and accurate estimates of above ground biomass AGB; these LiDAR platforms include airborne (e.g. LVIS), the International Space Station (NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), and satellites (e.g. ICESat-2). The current challenge is to effectively and seamlessly combine the aforementioned LiDAR-based data with new data sources such as P-band RADAR from ESA’s upcoming BIOMASS mission, existing ESA Sentinel-1 C-band SAR, and the 30 PB/yr of high cadence global coverage L-band SAR data from the upcoming NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission. Recent analysis using MAAP merged ICESat-2 and optical data (Harmonized Landsat Sentinel) produced the most comprehensively precise estimate of boreal-wide AGB to date. Another effort using MAAP is the production and open distribution of global comparisons of AGB map estimates, including from ICESat-2 and GEDI, to bolster stakeholder uptake for policy applications. These map estimates will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) database, likely aiding the next Global Carbon Stocktake of the UNFCCC. Furthermore, the biomass retrieval intercomparison exercise BRIX-2 could benefit from the MAAP providing standardized test cases (based on airborne campaign and spaceborne data) allowing the community to develop and apply retrieval algorithms based on these test cases, while forthcoming SAR data training curricula could also use the MAAP as a teaching and learning platform. The MAAP is meeting the challenges inherent in international, open science collaboration and large scale computing with a platform that is entirely open source and cloud native, using open standards for data access, manipulation, protocols, and formats. The MAAP data system consists of a dedicated data store whose data is indexed in an online catalog conforming to established metadata, application programmatic interfaces (APIs), and service interface standards, using an implementation of the open sourced NASA Common Metadata Repository. Federation of user identities allows users from either NASA or ESA to access and consume services from the other using a unified metadata catalog for the data utilized across the ESA and NASA MAAP platforms. Similarly, we are exploring how to increase interoperability to achieve a common approach to packaging, orchestrating and executing algorithms, with interoperable access to data for subsetting, fast browse, and cloud-optimized access, all using interoperable standards such as those from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Designed for interoperability, ESA and NASA utilize a common architecture for the software platform. It provides a cloud-based algorithm development environment (ADE) that enables scientists to develop algorithms collaboratively with access to the MAAP data catalog as well as other data archives. MAAP provides an Eclipse Che-based ADE supporting both Python and R languages, popular in this biomass community. Algorithms developed and containerized within the ADE can be deployed to run to thousands of computational nodes in the MAAP’s data processing system (DPS), dramatically speeding up processing and giving scientists a rapid, iterative turnaround of results. NASA’s implementation of the DPS is based on the Hybrid Science Data System (HySDS) framework, used by NASA flight projects to produce Earth science standard products.

cloud computing

Collaborative Data Curation to Support the Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP)

Upcoming space-borne missions will offer unprecedented data about Earth but will also feature exponentially high data volumes. These high data volumes will change the way the scientific community works with data and will also create a unique need for improved data sharing and collaboration. NASA and ESA are working together to address these issues by collaboratively developing the Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP) to improve the understanding of global aboveground terrestrial carbon dynamics. The MAAP will support ESA’s BIOMASS mission, NASA’s GEDI mission and NASA/ISRO’s NISAR mission. The MAAP will be developed in two phases: a pilot phase and a full production phase. The pilot phase will demonstrate collaboration and basic capabilities. The pilot phase will focus on biomass relevant airborne and field campaign data. Two NASA teams are supporting the development of the MAAP. The MAAP engineering team is responsible for the development, maintenance and operations of the MAAP system while the MAAP data team ensures the ongoing quality of the data, metadata and other information provided in the MAAP. The MAAP data team also supports the ingest and archive of identified data to the MAAP platform. This poster describes the use case development process for the pilot MAAP and the data curated in support of those use cases. Additionally, this presentation will outline the pilot MAAP data ingest process and metadata curation effort along with efforts to ensure interoperability between ESA and NASA data and metadata.

Bugbee, Kaylin

Joint ESA-NASA Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP)

The scientific community is faced with a need for greatly improved data sharing, analysis, visualization and advanced collaboration based firmly on open science principles. Recent and upcoming launches of new satellite missions with more complex and voluminous data, as well as the ever more urgent need to better understand the global carbon budget and related ecological processes, provided the immediate rational for the ESA-NASA Multi-mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP). This highly collaborative joint project of ESA and NASA established a framework between ESA and NASA to share data, science algorithms and compute resources in order to foster and accelerate scientific research conducted by ESA and NASA EO data users. Presented to the public in October 2021, the current version of MAAP provides a common cloud-based platform with computing capabilities co-located with the data, a collaborative coding and analysis environment, and a set of interoperable tools and algorithms developed to support the estimation and visualization of global above-ground biomass. Data from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission on the International Space Station and the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) have been instrumental in the first products of MAAP including the first comprehensive map of Boreal above-ground Biomass and a current Global Biomass Harmonization Activity, but the platform is also being specifically designed to support the forthcoming ESA Biomass mission and incorporate data from the upcoming NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission. While these missions and the corresponding research which includes airborne, field, and calibration/validation data collection and analyses, provide a wealth of data and information relating to global biomass estimation, they also present data storing, processing and sharing challenges. The NISAR mission alone will produce about 80TB/day. These large data volumes present a challenge that would otherwise place accessibility limits on the scientific community and impact scientific progress. Other challenges being addressed by MAAP include: 1) Enabling researchers to easily discover, process, visualize and analyze large volumes of data from both agencies; 2) Providing a wide variety of data in the same coordinate reference frame to enable comparison, analysis, data evaluation, and data generation; 3) Providing a version-controlled science algorithm development environment that supports tools, co-located data and processing resources; and 4) Addressing intellectual property and sharing challenges related to collaborative algorithm development and sharing of data and algorithms. MAAP products can be explored on the MAAP Dashboard at https://earthdata.nasa.gov/maap-biomass or the joint platform entrance at scimaap.net. MAAP also can be accessed through individual NASA (https://maap-project.org) and ESA (https://esa-maap.org/) landing pages.

cloud computing

Building a Data Ecosystem: A New Data Stewardship Paradigm for the Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP)

New adaptive approaches to Earth observation data stewardship need to be adopted in order to allow for higher data volumes, heterogeneous data and constantly evolving technologies. The data ecosystem approach to stewardship offers a viable solution to this need by placing an emphasis on the relationships between data, technologies and people. In this paper, we present the Joint ESA-NASA Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform’s (MAAP) creation of a data ecosystem to support global aboveground terrestrial carbon dynamics research. We present the components needed to support the MAAP data ecosystem along with two data stewardship workflows used in the MAAP and the development of extended metadata for MAAP.

Bugbee, Kaylin

Advancing Open Science Through Innovative Data System Solutions: The Joint ESA-NASA Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP)'s Data Ecosystem

Collaborative open science practices are changing the way research is conducted. These changes affect how scientists work together on data, code and information. Data systems enhance open science by offering forward thinking technological solutions, such as providing data and computation on the cloud, to enable collaboration, sharing and analysis. In this paper, we present our vision for a conceptual data system on the cloud that enables open science. We also present our work on the Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP)which has served as a pathfinder data system for this conceptual approach.

Kaylin Bugbee

Easy, Scalable Subsetting of GEDI Point Clouds

The GEDI Subsetter, a Python tool developed for NASA’s Multi-mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP), optimizes the accessibility and visualization of GEDI point clouds by enabling users to efficiently subset data in a convenient, scalable manner. Complex science data often requires users to learn new software skills and handle many large files. Handling and cleaning large data sets is tedious and error-prone. These challenges significantly impede analysis. One of the goals of NASA's MAAP is to provide a platform that lowers the barrier to conducting research and analysis at scale. When a group of MAAP users wanted to conduct above-ground biomass estimation using GEDI data, we found that their existing workflow for leveraging GEDI data suffered from the barriers mentioned above. Furthermore, their workflow did not scale easily beyond a small number of granules. We found that existing tools related to GEDI data retrieval and subsetting were too limiting, so the GEDI Subsetter was written to support MAAP users’ needs. Being able to run many subsetting jobs simultaneously in the MAAP, and parallelizing the code itself, has led to significant speed improvements in obtaining relevant data, reducing subsetting time from hours to minutes. MAAP users can now more quickly and easily obtain only the data relevant to their research, by choosing which GEDI collection they want to work with (L1A, L2A, L2B, or L4A), and how they want to subset it, by specifying an area of interest, a temporal range, and relevant attributes. This has significantly reduced the feedback loop for users, allowing them to much more quickly subset GEDI data and begin their analysis. Although the GEDI Subsetter originally targeted users of the MAAP, it is generalized such that it can also be used outside of the MAAP and includes a command-line interface for convenience. Furthermore, with minor modifications, it should be possible to use it with non-GEDI data as the general pattern should be applicable to other sparse/track-based sensors.

Charles Daniels

Entwine Point Tiles for 3D Visualization and Querying of ICESat-2

Point Cloud data from non-optical sensors present challenges in scientific computing in both volume of data and files, even for cloud services environments. As part of the Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform (MAAP), a joint open science platform for global biomass modelling, we’ve developed a cloud optimized workflow for using ATL08 (ICESat-2) data as a point cloud. For MAAP, the ATL08 data product is published as Entwine Point Tiles (EPT), allowing users to visualize and query the full extent of this collection interactively without pre-downloading, or preprocessing. The EPT format is a cloud-optimized point cloud data format which re-organizes points into a cloud friendly spatially indexed data structure. MAAP uses AWS S3 to store these point clouds and serves them over OGC specified APIs, 3DTiles for visualization, and WFS for querying. This workflow allows for interactive 3D visualizations in a web browser, including notebook environments and facilitates on the fly subsetting for interactive data exploration, all of which can be applied to other similar sensors.

Alex Mandel

The First Government Sanctioned Delivery of Medical Supplies by Remotely Controlled Unmanned Aerial System (UAS)

The first government sanctioned delivery of medical supplies by UAS occurred at Wise, Virginia, on July 17, 2015. The "Let's Fly Wisely" event was a demonstration of the humanitarian use of UAS to facilitate delivery of medical supplies to remote or otherwise difficult-to-reach areas. The event was the result of coordinated efforts by a partnership which included the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center (LaRC), Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership (MAAP), Flirtey Corporation, Lonesome Pine Airport, Remote Area Medical (RAM), Health Wagon, SEESPAN Aerial Interactive, Rx Partnership, and Wise County, Virginia. The historic event occurred during the annual Remote Area Medical clinic at the Wise County Fairgrounds. The medical supplies in small packages were delivered to the Wise County Fairgrounds from the Lonesome Pine Airport by UAS operated by Firtey. A larger supply of medical supplies were delivered to the Lonesome Pine Airport from the Tazewell County Airport by NASA Langley's SR22 UAS Surrogate Research aircraft. The UAS Surrogate aircraft was remotely controlled for most of the flight by a UAS Ground Control Station located at the Lonesome Pine Airport. The medical supplies were delivered from the UAS Surrogate to Flirtey for final delivery by Hex Multi-Rotor UAS in smaller packages and multiple trips to the fairgrounds. A Certificate of Authorization (COA) issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) designated the site as an authorized UAS test site. The paper will present additional details of the historic delivery of pharmaceuticals by UAS during the "Let's Fly Wisely" event. The paper will also provide details of NASA's SR22 UAS Surrogate Research aircraft. The UAS Surrogate was designed to investigate the procedures, aircraft sensors and other systems that may be required to allow Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) to safely operate with manned aircraft in the National Airspace System (NAS).

Howell, Charles T., III

Airborne Radar for sUAS Sense and Avoid

A primary challenge for the safe integration of small UAS operations into the National Airspace System (NAS) is traffic deconfliction, both from manned and unmanned aircraft. The UAS Traffic Management (UTM) project being conducted at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) considers a layered approach to separation provision, ranging from segregation of operations through airspace volumes (geofences) to autonomous sense and avoid (SAA) technologies for higher risk, densely occupied airspace. Cooperative SAA systems, such as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) and/or vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems provide significant additional risk mitigation but they fail to adequately mitigate collision risks for non-cooperative (non-transponder equipped) airborne aircraft. The RAAVIN (Radar on Autonomous Aircraft to Verify ICAROUS Navigation) flight test being conducted by NASA and the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership (MAAP) was designed to investigate the applicability and performance of a prototype, commercially available sUAS radar to detect and track non-cooperative airborne traffic, both manned and unmanned. The radar selected for this research was a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar with 120 degree azimuth and 80 degree elevation field of view operating at 24.55GHz center frequency with a 200 MHz bandwidth. The radar transmits 2 watts of power thru a Metamaterial Electronically Scanning Array antenna in horizontal polarization. When the radar is transmitting, personnel must be at least 1 meter away from the active array to limit nonionizing radiation exposure. The radar physical dimensions are 18.7cm by 12.1cm by 4.1cm and it weighs less than 820 grams making it well suited for installation on small UASs. The onboard, SAA capability, known as ICAROUS, (Independent Configurable Architecture for Reliable Operations of Unmanned Systems), developed by NASA to support sUAS operations, will provide autonomous guidance using the traffic radar tracks from the onboard radar. The RAAVIN set of studies will be conducted in three phases. The first phase included outdoor, ground-based radar evaluations performed at the Virginia Tech’s Kentland Farm testing range in Blacksburg, VA. The test was designed to measure how well the radar could detect and track a small UAS flying in the radar’s field of view. The radar was used to monitor 5 test flights consisting of outbound, inbound and crossing routes at different ranges and altitudes. The UAS flown during the ground test was the Inspire 2, a quad copter weighing less than 4250 grams (10 pounds) at maximum payload. The radar was set up to scan and track targets over its full azimuthal field of view from 0 to 40 degrees in elevation. The radar was configured to eliminate tracks generated from any targets located beyond 2000 meters from the radar and moving at velocities under 1.45 meters per second. For subsequent phases of the study the radar will be integrated with a sUAS platform to evaluate its performance in flight for SAA applications ranging from sUAS to manned GA aircraft detections and tracking. Preliminary data analysis from the first outdoor ground tests showed the radar performed well at tracking the vehicle as it flew outbound and repeatedly maintained a track out to 1000 meters (maximum 1387 meters) until the vehicle slowed to a stop to reverse direction to fly inbound. As the Inspire flew inbound tracks from beyond 800 meters, a reacquisition time delay was consistently observed between when the Inspire exceeds a speed of 1.45 meters per second and when the radar indicated an inbound target was present and maintained its track. The time delay varied between 6 seconds to over 37 seconds for the inbound flights examined, and typically resulted in about a 200 meter closure distance before the Inspire track was maintained. The radar performed well at both acquiring and tracking the vehicle as it flew crossing routes out past 400 meters across the azimuthal field of view. The radar and ICAROUS software will be integrated and flown on a BFD-1400-SE8-E UAS during the next phase of the RAAVIN project. The main goal at the conclusion of this effort is to determine if this radar technology can reliably support minimum requirements for SAA applications of sUAS. In particular, the study will measure the range of vehicle detections, lateral and vertical angular errors, false and missed/late detections, and estimated distance at closest point of approach after an avoidance maneuver is executed. This last metric is directly impacted by sensor performance and indicates its suitability for the task.

Szatkowski, George N.