NASA's ASTER User Authorization Site describes how one can become authorized to acquire new ASTER data for research or other purposes. The Japanese instrument ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) is mounted on NASA’s EOS Terra satellite and will soon begin acquiring image data of the Earth, in response to requests for such data from authorized ASTER users.

NASA has three types of authorized ASTER Users:

• ASTER Science Team Members (already authorized),
• EOS Principal Investigators (already authorized),
  - Facility Instrument Team Leaders and Team Members, PI Instrument PIs, and Inter-Disciplinary Science (IDS) PIs.
  - Does not include EOS Co-Investigators.
• Other approved investigators, authorized by proposal process.

"Other approved investigators" include basic and applied researchers from NASA, other government agencies, educational institutions, and the private commercial sector. To become an approved investigator, a proposal must be submitted from this website. The proposal review process is described in this website.

Before submitting an ASTER User Authorization proposal, the potential user should first do two things:

1. Determine whether the necessary data has already been acquired:

   Examine the EOS archives at the EROS Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center to determine whether ASTER has already acquired the necessary data. This can be accomplished using the the Earth Observing System Data Gateway (EDG) search and order tools. Previously acquired data are available to anyone at the marginal cost of filling the user’s request.
   

2. Determine whether the data have already been requested (but not acquired) :

   The ASTER Science Team has allocated a large fraction of ASTER’s observing time to acquire data that will be of wide use to the Earth science community (see Notes section). Requests for these data have already been submitted.  If the required data have already been requested, a potential user might possibly choose to wait until these data were acquired, without entering any new data acquisition request.

    

Why requests for new ASTER data are necessary

The ASTER instrument will observe the Earth for approximately 8 minutes out of every 99-minute EOS-AM1 orbit. The ground-based ASTER scheduling system will use a database of requests for ASTER data in order to determine which areas to observe and when. Only authorized ASTER users can submit requests for ASTER data to the ASTER scheduling system.

For more information on the ASTER instrument, visit the ASTER Science Team’s home page. For more information on the EOS-AM1 mission, visit the EOS home page.

Varieties of ASTER User Authorization Proposal

Three types of proposal may be submitted from this site. These are:

1. Research proposal
   Basic or applied research
   
   
2. Proposal for operational or commercial demonstration
   Special form of applied research, to demonstrate the potential of ASTER-like data for eventual operational or commercial use
   
   
3. Educational proposal

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