October 5, 2001

NASA ANNOUNCES EARTH SCIENCE APPLICATIONS PROJECTS

NASA will fund 15 projects designed to help state, local, regional and tribal government organizations apply NASA and commercially derived knowledge and tools to address Earth Science related issues that impact our daily lives.

The projects provide information or help in decision making for resource management, environmental assessment, community growth and infrastructure, and disaster management. Applications developed by these awards will benefit the awardees and government entities across the United States.

A major objective of NASA's Earth Science Applications Program is the development of applications that provide geospatial information to support communities. NASA hopes to act as a catalyst for the development and adoption of methods and techniques by local communities that draw upon science, data and technology derived from Earth Science funded research, as well as from commercial data, data products and industry capabilities.

NASA, as a research and development organization, does not provide funding to support the operational requirements and services of other agencies or organizations. Operations for these projects will be funded by the user organizations and conducted exclusively by the user, or in association with other public or private entities.

The selections are in response to a Broad Agency Announcement the agency issued last spring. The goal of this effort is the implementation of on-going applications that help to create systemic change in the affected communities, leading to better informed decision making and increasing productivity of local efforts in problem solving.

The projects also hope to:

• Extend the benefits of NASA derived data, research and technology from global and national levels to state, local, regional and tribal levels
  
• Support development of a robust remote sensing community involving public and private sector partners
  
• Transfer remote sensing and associated technologies to the user community with the prime responsibility in the nation for resource management and related activities requiring geospatial information
  
• Stimulate the use of commercial data, data products and operational capabilities by public sector organizations
  
• Coordinate capture and dissemination of geospatial data at the state, local regional and tribal levels with national and global spatial data infrastructures

Examples of selected projects include use of remote sensing data for resource management and community planning of the Nez Perce tribal reservation; sensing and monitoring of invasive plant species in the state of Idaho; and monitoring, understanding and regulating rapidly growing urban watersheds in Texas.

Each project will be funded for a maximum three year term and each of the projects will address existing identified problems within communities, with the hope that after the three year period communities will take full ownership of the new decision support systems.

Twelve of the fifteen projects include partnerships with commercial organizations. Fourteen of the fifteen projects will incorporate use of commercial data. The total three year NASA funding for the project will be approximately $12 million, with an additional $2 million in cost sharing from the partnering organizations. The fifteen projects are located in thirteen states across the country. NASA's Stennis Space Center, Miss., will oversee the implementation of these awards.

A complete listing of the projects can be found on the Earth Sciences web site at: http://www.earth.nasa.gov/

##

Contact:
David E. Steitz
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1730

This text derived from http://www.nasa.gov/releases/2001/index.html

Recommend this Article to a Friend

Back to: News