NASA
DID YOU KNOW ...
GRACE Follow-On Satellite
NASA ’ S CLIMATE MISSION
Sitting in a tin can far above the world is , it turns out , a pretty good place to survey changes to Earth ’ s climate , a pivotal mission for our times . Not only does the climate need monitoring , but policymakers need to know which of their schemes are working . For that NASA is working with Boston Consulting Group to work out how to collate the data it ’ s collecting . “ We want to start a pilot , probably in the next six months , to really take a look at the climate data NASA has , while bringing in other data sets from other organisations [ such as the European Space Agency , ESA ],” says Ron Thompson , chief data officer ( CDO ) and deputy digital transformation Officer at NASA . “ That way we can absolutely show policymakers how the climate policies make an impact . We can take the information we collect today and do ‘ what if ’ trade-offs on climate . We ’ re working with Gavin Schmidt , our acting climate change lead at NASA , on coming up with a prototype to address some of these questions . That will be in the cloud , using publicly available datasets .”
upside , but it is something different . The opportunity is to really integrate this across the agency .”
One area NASA is looking to improve is in process transformation – financial , travel and so on . The processes must be repeatable across all divisions of the organisation and easily understood . Thompson is using robotic process automation ( RPA ), which he describes as “ the most mature area where we ’ re seeing value in digital transformation .” The value comes in freeing up time to work on “ more meaningful , challenging work ”.
But technology at NASA doesn ’ t just mean back office functions . “ We ’ re looking at doing a digital twin for our Orion mission , the next man mission to the moon . We want to set that up to test our common models and use agency-wide standards using modelbased systems and engineering across the agency .” That digital twin can be used to analyse safety for mission insurance . AI is also
Efficient Descent Advisor , Simulaiton Number 2 , ATC Lab N-257
32 August 2021