DESIS - DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer Mission installed on the International Space Station (ISS)

Data Access

DESIS Data can be tasked and ordered for free for scientific purposes based on a general image data announcement that will be open until the DESIS mission ends. It requires a short description of the envisaged use of the data in form of a proposal and a subsequent review process.

DESIS Data Announcement of Opportunity

The main objective of the “DESIS Data Announcement of Opportunity” is to evaluate the scientific capabilities of the DESIS data. It comprises basic and application-oriented research, including development and demonstration of future applications to increase knowledge in science and excludes commercial use. Scientific use of the DESIS data is not restricted to any specific topic but it can include:

  • Basic and application oriented research,
  • Preparation and execution of government-funded education, research and development programs,
  • Development and demonstration of future applications for scientific and/or operational use,
  • Support of the DESIS mission (e.g. calibration, monitoring and validation) and
  • Exploring synergies with other operating and upcoming Earth observing sensors onboard ISS such as ECOSTRESS, GEDI, OCO-3 and EMIT (all NASA), the hyperspectral HISUI (METI) and future sensor systems integrated into MUSES platform.

This general “DESIS Data Announcement of Opportunity” will be open until the DESIS mission ends. The general constraints of the call and the data ordering procedure are described in the following.

General constraints

This AO is addressed to users that are interested to use DESIS for scientific purposes only. For any commercial use of the data, please contact TBE directly. DLR may use and distribute or otherwise make available to Third Parties DESIS Image Data for scientific use (user shall keep themselves updated about changes of license conditions and is referred to the DESIS website):

  • For scientific purposes, DLR can share DESIS data with partners and institutions without any restrictions (e.g. nationality) and without any approval by Teledyne Brown Engineering

Based on contractual requirements with TBE, DLR can allow scientific users to task DESIS at least 2.000 minutes per calendar year, divided evenly over each month (i.e., approximately 166 minutes per month). It means that the DESIS instrument is not applicable to map larger areas. Due to this major constraint, DESIS data tasking requires a short proposal that needs to be submitted to DLR DESIS Science Coordination (for details see link Proposal Template). Based on the user proposal, it will be evaluated, if:

  • requested amount of data is suits the purpose of the research question,
  • it is considered that DESIS is not a mapping mission due to the restriction to 2000 min data takes per year.

However, DLR can’t guarantee exclusive rights of requested and tasked data based on the above mentioned proposals because every registered DESIS science user can access all archived DESIS products in the data archives of DLR (EOWEB GeoPortal, see link). Further, everybody can access data archived at TBE.

Links

Important documents for data ordering