Call letter: Appendix D

Appendix D

NASA Facility Instruments

Update: July 16, 2025

Several remote sensing systems are considered as NASA facility instruments, in part because they support multiple science disciplines and a variety of NASA science objectives. They are supported by managers in the ESD Research and Analysis program, and/or the EOS Project Science Office, and are made available to the wider NASA science community via the Flight Request process. In most cases, instrument and Science Support Assets operating and data processing costs are recovered from the requesting individual or their sponsors.

• NASA Instrument Concurrence by Ryan Pavlick is required for the use of the AVIRIS instruments.
• NASA Instrument Concurrence by Gerald Bawden is required for the use of UAVSAR.

AVIRIS-C, AVIRIS-NG, AVIRIS-3 & AVIRIS-5

JPL operates the AVIRIS-C (Classic), AVIRIS-NG (Next Generation), AVIRIS-3, and AVIRIS-5 Imaging Spectrometers, which are available as NASA facility instruments for scientific research and applications. Investigators are expected to pay for JPL Imaging Spectrometer data acquisition, calibration, engineering support and processing costs associated with their investigations. If JPL Imaging Spectrometers are required as part of an approved proposal, then these costs should be included in the proposal budget or reserved for this purpose at NASA Headquarters. Please contact your Technical Monitor if you have any questions about this. If your JPL Imaging Spectrometer requirements are new and were not in the originally selected proposal, then resources must be found within your existing budget or secured through an augmentation request to your Technical Monitor or Program Manager at NASA Headquarters.  

AVIRIS-3 is the newly developed Airborne visible/infrared Imaging Spectrometer compatible with the B200s, Gulfstreams, and ER-2 and can be adapted to other platforms. AVIRIS-NG is a facility instrument available for research campaigns using the commercial Twin Otter, King Air, and NASA ER-2 platforms and is available for integration on the Gulfstream III and V. AVIRIS-C is also flying on the NASA ER-2 on a regular basis as part of the Western Diversity Time Series (WDTS) Campaign. AVIRIS-C can be flown on the Twin Otter for particular investigations or AVIRIS-NG can be used for flying higher spectral and spatial sampling collections for Visible to Shortwave IR imaging spectroscopy (380 to 2510 nm). Furthermore, scenes from the AVIRIS-C archive (i.e., data that have already been acquired) can be obtained here.  AVIRIS-NG data archive and details can be found here. For instrument details please visit their respective instrument page (AVIRIS-3, AVIRIS-NG, and AVIRIS-C).

MASTER, eMAS, and PICARD

The MODIS/ASTER airborne simulator (MASTER) is currently available for flights aboard the NASA ER-2. It may also be integrated on the NASA P-3B and B-200. If opportunities to support science on other aircraft are presented, ASF can support engineering to integrate MASTER onto new platforms. 

The enhanced MODIS simulator (eMAS) is currently available. The calibration and data processing (Level-1b and geolocation) are supported by the Airborne Sensor Facility at NASA Ames Research Center. Higher-level products are possible in some instances. These are supported separately by the eMAS and PICARD science POC (Dr. Kerry Meyer), the MASTER instrument PI (Dr. Simon Hook), or other research teams and should not be assumed in any Flight Request.

The Pushbroom Imager for Cloud and Aerosol Research and Development (PICARD) is a V/SWIR imaging spectrometer designed to support atmospheric research. It features an undistorted wide field of view, and 50 meter resolution pixels when flown on the ER-2 aircraft. It is intended to simulate existing satellite imager products (MODIS/VIIRS,) and to validate radiances and geophysical retrievals, with an emphasis on cloud and aerosol science. It will also be used to prototype future imager requirements and algorithms, and to contribute to multi-disciplinary NASA field studies.

Additional information can be obtained from: James Jacobson.

LVIS

The Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) is an airborne, wide-swath, full-waveform, scanning laser altimeter that produces precise and accurate large area (10,000 to 100,000s of sq. km) maps of surface topography, and any vertical height and structure within each laser footprint. LVIS digitally records both the shapes of the transmitted and reflected laser waveforms and precisely computes geolocation to provide a true 3-dimensional representation of the surface. The nominal LVIS data swath is 2 km and a typical configuration using 10-meter footprints covers 24 square kilometers per minute at 400 knots. High resolution 150-megapixel (PhaseOne) imagery is captured simultaneously documenting the surface conditions during lidar sampling.  Standard data products include: Level 1B - the geolocated return laser waveform and Level 2 - elevation and height products extracted from the Level 1B waveform.  Additional parameters can be extracted from the full waveform lidar data with custom algorithms built in collaboration with the LVIS processing team. The decimeter-accurate topography maps and precisely geolocated return waveforms produced by LVIS provide Earth scientists with a unique data set for studies such as topography, hydrology, land ice, sea ice, biodiversity, and ecology. Laser footprint size is adjustable from 5 m to 25 m, depending on the application. A dual-sensor flight configuration is also available. Interested users are encouraged to contact J. Bryan Blair or alternate contact: David Rabine to discuss further details of the capabilities of the facility.

UAVSAR

UAVSAR/L-band: The Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), a high resolution, fully polarimetric, L-band SAR designed for repeat pass InSAR applications, is available as a NASA facility instrument for scientific research and applications. Investigators are expected to pay for UAVSAR data acquisition and processing costs associated with their investigations, unless they were approved as part of the original proposal selection. These costs should already be provided for in your budget or reserved for this purpose at NASA Headquarters. UAVSAR currently flies on the C20-A.

UAVSAR can also be configured to operate in P-band (also known as AirMOSS) or Ka-band (also known as GLISTIN-A).  The P-band and Ka-band instruments are part of the UAVSAR facility instrument suite and users may request these instruments through SOFRS by selecting UAVSAR by the specific frequency (L-band, Ka-band or P-band). 

All UAVSAR Flight Requests should clearly identify: (i) a target data collection window (ii) the desired instrument (UAVSAR L-band, P-band, or Ka-band) and (iii) the area of interest in a GIS-supported format (e.g. coordinates KML, GEOJSON, or shapefile). After submission of the flight request, the UAVSAR science coordinator will contact you to refine the data collection strategy and the finalized plan will be used to estimate flight hours and mission peculiar costs (MPCs). Users are responsible for ensuring that their entire science experiment is accounted for within the submitted Flight Request; any expansion of the scope of the science experiment will require new Flight Request approval.

NASA data acquired by UAVSAR are processed at JPL and archived for distribution at the Alaska Satellite Facility, where you may download the processed data products at no charge. For more information about UAVSAR, visit their website. 

NAST-I

The National Airborne Sounder Testbed-Interferometer (NAST-I) is a high spectral resolution (0.25cm-1) and high spatial resolution (0.13 km linear resolution per km of aircraft flight altitude, at nadir) scanning (2.3 km ground cross-track swath width per km of aircraft flight altitude) passive infrared (IR) Michelson interferometer sounding system that was developed to be flown on high-altitude aircraft to provide experimental observations needed to finalize the specifications and to test proposed designs and data processing algorithms for the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) flying on the Suomi NPP (SNPP) and Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) platforms. Because the NAST-I infrared spectral radiance and temperature, humidity, trace species, cloud and surface property soundings have unprecedented spectral and high spatial resolution, respectively, the data can be used to support a variety of satellite sensor calibration / validation and atmospheric research programs. The NAST-I covers a spectral range from ~ 600-2900 cm-1 (3.5-16 microns) with 0.25 cm-1 spectral resolution, yielding more than 9000 spectral channels of radiance emission/absorption information. The NAST-I instrument has flown numerous science missions on the ER-2, WB-57, and Proteus aircraft, and the team has evaluated efforts needed to become operational on the DC-8.  Most recently, NAST-I was part of the ER-2 science payload for the WHyMSIE field campaign conducted during October-November, 2024 to improve characterization of the planetary boundary-layer (PBL) (http://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/climate/campaigns/WHyMSIE). Additional information can be obtained from Anna Noe, Dr. Xu Liu or Dr. Allen Larar.