News & Events

Prepare science community for SBG, NASA has funded a Pathfinder activity

On May 27th 2020, the Surface Biology and Geology study team hosted the second of three webinars being held in place of the previously planned third SBG community workshop. The goal of these webinars is to engage with the science and applications community to provide an update on the SBG architecture design and science valuation process and to solicit feedback prior to providing architecture recommendations to NASA Headquarters in July 2020. The first webinar on March 26 provided a high-level overview of the Research and Applications (R&A) activities and the status of the architecture study as it progressed from Phase 1 “Candidate Architectures” to Phase 2 “Architecture Assessment”. This second webinar, provided a more detailed view on how the R&A working groups provided input to the mission design sessions to evaluate the VSWIR and TIR architectural elements, which took place in April and May 2020 at NASA LaRC, JPL, GSFC, and ARC.

This webinar will begin with a review of the science and applications metrics used to score architectures to be followed by a presentation of the recommended options, a preferred option, and two high-value alternates. The SBG team will review the process for community feedback, and NASA HQ staff, including Charles Webb, Associate Director for Flight Programs, Earth Science Division, who will discuss the next steps, leading to a decision.

The SBG Study team seeks expertise and information from across the spectrum of Earth Science research, applications, technology, mission formulation and implementation, as well as across the major stakeholder organizations in government (NASA and non-NASA), academia, industry and the international community. International (i.e. non-US) and commercial (i.e. non-government) responses are especially encouraged.

The SBG team invites the science, applications and space-science communities to a continuing series of webinars to engage with progress and recommended architectures for community input. The next webinar will be on the 27th of May at 1:00 PM EDT (1500 UTC) and will present, first the science and application guidance used by the architecture teams, and second, the process and status of the architecture activity, as it nears a final set of recommended architectures.

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have cancelled the in-person SBG Community Workshop that was planned for May 26-29. Instead, we will hold a program of virtual meetings during the spring. We will also be developing an online training workshop for early career scientists and others interested in new tools for working with VSWIR and TIR data: stay tuned for announcements on that.

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