The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Sciences and Exploration Directorate has a requirement for the Earth Science Data and Information System project entitled ESDIS Next (ENX). This is the evolution and follow-on to the current Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Evolution and Development (EED-3) contract.

The Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project, Code 423 at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), is a major core capability within the ESDS Program. Program. The ESDIS Project is responsible for the ingest, processing, archiving and distribution of data from a large number of Earth observing satellites, instruments on various platforms, observations, and
other data sets. ESDIS data is stored on premises at Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) distributed across the United States and in commercial cloud archives. Various tools and services are developed and operated by the ESDIS project to search, discover, transform, analyze, and visualize the data in order to serve millions of users around the world covering many Earth science disciplines. The ESDIS Project is striving to enable cross discipline science to speed up the cycle for creating new scientific research. Additionally, given the ever increasing size of the data holdings, the ESDIS Project is enabling the ability to bring analysis to the data in the cloud to avoid the complexities of downloading and processing very large data sets.

The ESDIS Project has made initial steps to develop and operate key infrastructure components in the commercial cloud including the DAAC functions of data ingest, archive, and distribution. Under ENX, NASA is seeking to complete the transition to a predominately cloud-based enterprise that successfully balances cost efficiency and responsiveness to mission requirements
and can be leveraged as a platform for external partners and application developers. The transition of common operational components and IT infrastructure to the commercial cloud will allow the DAACs to focus more on their core competencies of data stewardship and enabling science for larger, more diverse user communities, and less on IT maintenance and operations. As part of this transition under ENX, NASA is seeking to complete the decommissioning of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Core System (ECS) and the implementation and operation of more Enterprise-level tools, services, and applications. Given the long history of ESDIS as a loosely coupled system of systems, a key challenge is reducing
duplication, and development and maintenance costs while at the same time increasing the science benefit for users. During the transition, the current system will need to continue current operations and support new missions and requirements. These efforts are expected to provide Earth science data users with advanced capabilities well beyond current capabilities. The utilization of commercial cloud is also expected to streamline maintenance and operations.

Given the increased visibility and focus on cyber security and increased pace of exploits, ESDIS is redoubling its efforts to maintain a proactive security posture across all data systems in its portfolio. A critical challenge in this area is balancing security and validity of the data sets with the needs of users under the open-source science initiative.

The ESDIS Project, manages an array of information technology (IT) infrastructure

• In the performance of this contract, the ENX contractor is required to coordinate and integrate task related activities with the ESDIS Project, the Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs), other Earth science data centers, the science investigator teams, the user community, other contractors, and other SMD organizations
• The contractor’s overall goal shall be to continuously improve the operations, the scalability, quality, reliability, availability, functionality, operability, and performance of hardware and software systems within ESDIS while reducing operational costs, maintenance costs, retiring old services or applications and implementing/transitioning to new capabilities or systems
• The contractor may be tasked to:
  • Provide new systems and/or major upgrades to existing systems
  • Leverage commercial cloud for replacing and/or augmenting current systems
  • Conduct engineering studies directed by the Government
  • Provide maintenance and sustainment of software components (including COTS/FOSS) and hardware components consistent with the operational availability needs of the DAACs and science users
  • Deliver engineering solutions to lower the overall cost of maintenance and operations, including cloud costs
  • Provide user support
  • Perform operations for enterprise system components, tools, or services
• In support of NASA’s open-source science initiative, all new development shall adhere to opensource best practices and SPD-41a
• Additionally, to be able to respond quickly to evolving requirements, development shall be orchestrated via a scaled agile development methodology that will include teams from both the ENX contractor and other ESDIS development teams