NASA is embarking on a large-scale cloud migration effort to move its Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) program to the cloud.

Currently underway, the organization's website notes that the migration will cover all "NASA Earth science data sites," and is expected to remain ongoing to the end of 2026.

The Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) manages Earth data for NASA, gathered from satellites, aircraft, and in situ measurements.

In a post explaining the "Earthdata Cloud Evolution," NASA said that, due to the launch of "new, high-data-volume Earth observation missions," the agency requires a cost-effective and scalable storage and compute strategy.

These include the upcoming Surface Water Ocean Topography mission and the NASA-Indian Space Research Organisation Synthetic Aperture Radar mission.

Thus, in addition to migrating existing data, the agency will also develop and operate components of the EOSDIS in a commercial cloud environment dubbed Earthdata Cloud.

Earthdata Cloud itself was established in 2019, with key services including the Common Metafate Repository and Earthdata Search deployed within it. The current systems set to be migrated include NASA's Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs). The agency currently estimates that by 2030, the volume of data in the EOSDIS archive will surpass 320 petabytes.

NASA said that by migrating the archives to the cloud, it will place NASA Earth observation data “close to compute,” and enable more efficient access to data. According to the agency, the DAACs will "continue to serve as the gateways to EOSDIS data holdings and provide a wide range of support services for users."

While noting that the system will be based in the "commercial cloud," NASA has partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft, and has established Space Act Agreements (SAAs) with all three. The archival data seems set to be moved to AWS, as per a different post from NASA. The agency said it is considering further agreements with the likes of Esri, IBM, and Nvidia, looking to see how AI could further its research.

EOSDIS has been operational since 1994 and has always made its Earth science data openly available to users. Currently, it has some 59 petabytes of data in the archive.