Legislation would ensure partnerships between NASA and the private sector to boost satellite-enabled research
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper and John Cornyn applauded the unanimous Senate passage of their bipartisan Accessing Satellite Capabilities to Enable New Discoveries (ASCEND) Act, which would codify NASA’s Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition (CSDA) program and continue shared access to commercial small-satellite (SmallSat) datasets that prove crucial for Earth science research and applications. The bill passed the Senate last week and now heads to the House of Representatives.
“Scientists rely on satellite data to understand Earth and beyond. We’re one step closer to signing our ASCEND Act into law to strengthen our private-sector partnerships for satellite data and drive new discoveries,” said Hickenlooper.
“Investing in satellite data and imagery gives us a deeper understanding of everything from agricultural yields to weather forecasting and disaster response,” said Cornyn. “This legislation would create a permanent program through NASA to expand the data pool available to us and build on prior success.”
Alongside the unprecedented growth of the commercial space industry, technological advancements have enabled the development of SmallSats with novel capabilities. Commercial SmallSats provide high-resolution data to complement the suite of Earth observations acquired by NASA, other U.S. Government agencies, and international partners. Earth observation data supplied by satellites in orbit provide important information for a variety of purposes, including increasing agricultural crop yields, informing forest conservation, improving disaster mitigation and response, forecasting space weather, advancing science, and more.
NASA established CSDA as a pilot program in 2017 to identify and evaluate commercial capabilities, establish new processes to onramp vendors, and enable broad sharing and use of acquired data products. The CSDA pilot program proved to be a success, with participating scientists finding the program’s datasets to be useful and reliable for a variety of research topics. Today, fifteen commercial vendors are providing 7 unique data types to federal researchers through CSDA.
The ASCEND Act would permanently authorize CSDA within NASA to sustain and expand the program and continue to leverage the advancing capabilities in remote sensing offered by commercial vendors.
Specifically, this legislation will:
- Establish CSDA as a permanent program within NASA’s Earth Science Division
- Direct NASA to expand procurement licenses and provide federal agencies access to high-quality Earth remote sensing datasets and imagery
- Promote the acquisition of new datasets for scientific and non-scientific applications
- Require an annual report to Congress on the uses and impact of commercial data products and licensing agreements
A one-pager on the bill is available HERE. The full text of the bill is available HERE.
###