NASA’s Earth-observing satellite missions form one of the most comprehensive records of planetary change ever assembled, tracking aerosols, sea levels, land cover, cloud cover, and dozens of other features over years and decades. Sustaining that record for the scientific and operational communities that depend on it requires more than engineering talent. It demands sustained planning for an uncertain future, including anticipating where mission delays, budget shifts, or technological disruptions could create gaps in the data record.
Lindsey Jacobson, a figure within NASA’s Earth Science division, has worked on that challenge: building the institutional foresight needed to keep a multi-decade observation program intact even as circumstances change. Her work centers on scenario planning for Earth-observing missions, an approach borrowed from other fields that require long-term investment under conditions of uncertainty.
What happened
A NASA feature published on the agency’s Earth Science website profiles Jacobson and the scenario-planning effort she has helped develop. The profile describes how mission planners within the Earth Science division have begun to apply structured foresight techniques to identify risks to data continuity and to develop contingencies before disruptions become irreversible.
The work draws on a tradition of long-range planning more commonly associated with defense, intelligence, and corporate strategy communities. In those settings, scenario planning is used to stress-test assumptions, surface hidden dependencies, and prepare decision-makers for a range of possible futures rather than a single projected outcome. NASA Earth Science has adapted the approach to a different problem: the preservation of climate and Earth-system data records whose scientific value depends on continuity measured in decades.
Why it matters
Earth Science missions are particularly vulnerable to continuity gaps because many of the most valuable measurements — such as sea level rise, ice sheet mass balance, and atmospheric composition — depend on uninterrupted multi-decadal time series. A break of even a few years can complicate efforts to distinguish long-term trends from natural variability. Once a gap opens, it can take years to rebuild a comparable record, since calibration, orbit characteristics, and instrument design must be consistent across mission generations to maintain scientific continuity.
The stakes extend beyond academic research. Operational users — including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Defense, agricultural agencies, and state and local governments managing water resources, wildfire risk, and coastal infrastructure — rely on NASA Earth observations for time-sensitive decisions. A data gap in a key measurement can degrade forecasting models, interrupt environmental monitoring, and complicate the work of emergency managers.
Background and context
NASA currently operates more than two dozen Earth-observing satellites and instruments, many of them in extended missions well past their original design lifetimes. Replacing them requires not just building new hardware but ensuring that successor missions can deliver measurements that are directly comparable to the records they inherit. The Landsat program, which has produced a continuous land-imaging record since 1972, is often cited as a model of this kind of long-term continuity planning.
Continuity planning in Earth Science has long been organized around the idea of “mission successions” — pairs or series of missions designed to hand off measurements from one spacecraft to the next. The Landsat series, the Jason series of ocean altimetry missions, and the Terra, Aqua, and Aura satellites in NASA’s EOS fleet all reflect this approach. In practice, however, successions have not always gone smoothly. Cost growth, launch delays, instrument failures, and shifting agency priorities have repeatedly created tension between the goal of unbroken records and the realities of program management.
Jacobson’s scenario-planning work appears to grow out of that history. By formalizing the process of imagining disruption before it occurs, the Earth Science division is attempting to move from reactive crisis management to proactive risk mitigation — identifying which measurements are most exposed to continuity gaps and which mission decisions carry the greatest consequences for the long-term record.
Analysis: The core challenge facing NASA’s Earth Science program is not solely a technical or budgetary one but a structural one. Climate and Earth system science depend on records whose value increases with length, yet the agencies and institutions that produce those records operate on political and funding cycles that are far shorter. Scenario planning, as practiced by Jacobson, represents an attempt to bridge that mismatch by identifying risks in advance and developing contingencies before a crisis forces abrupt decisions. Whether such planning can fully insulate a multi-decade science program from the volatility of annual appropriations remains an open question, particularly as the costs of flagship Earth-observing missions continue to rise and as commercial satellite providers increasingly offer data products that were once the exclusive domain of government agencies.
The emergence of commercial Earth-observation companies introduces a further variable. Firms such as Planet Labs, Maxar, and others now operate constellations that produce imagery and derived data products at cadences and resolutions that were unavailable a decade ago. For some measurement categories, commercial data may eventually supplement or substitute for government missions. For others — particularly those requiring rigorously calibrated, long-term instruments such as radiometers and altimeters — government missions remain the standard. How scenario planning accounts for this shifting landscape will shape the next generation of investment decisions.
There is also a procurement dimension. NASA’s Earth Science missions are typically selected through a competitive process, developed over many years, and launched on schedules that assume stable funding. A scenario-planning framework that systematically maps risks across cost, schedule, technical performance, and external demand could, in principle, allow the agency to make earlier and more transparent trade-offs. The extent to which such a framework is shared with external scientific and operational users, however, will determine whether it functions as a genuine planning instrument or as an internal exercise.
What to watch next
Several developments will test the durability of the approach Jacobson and her colleagues are building. The next decadal survey in Earth Science, conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, will set priorities for the coming decade and is likely to incorporate continuity considerations into its recommendations. The implementation of those recommendations, and how NASA responds to them under whatever budget environment prevails, will be the first major test of how scenario planning interacts with the formal prioritization process.
The transition of legacy missions into extended operations, and the decisions about which missions to refly, extend, or retire, will offer more immediate signals. Any decision to terminate or restructure a mission that produces a record with no planned successor would indicate where the foresight process has identified acceptable risk and where it has not. Conversely, investments in commercial data purchases as gap-fillers will suggest where the agency judges continuity to be unrecoverable through new government missions alone.
International partnerships will also play a role. Several key Earth-observing missions rely on cooperation with the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and other partners. Scenarios that account for shifts in those partnerships — whether through new agreements or through disruption of existing ones — will shape how the agency weighs risk across its portfolio.
Conclusion
The work of building institutional foresight for Earth Science is unglamorous by the standards of headline-grabbing spaceflight achievements. It is, however, the kind of work on which the long-term credibility of climate and Earth-system science depends. Jacobson’s effort, as described by NASA, reflects a recognition that the continuity of the planetary record is not something that can be assumed. It must be actively planned for, defended, and paid for, year after year, across changes in administration, budget, and technology. Whether that planning is enough to protect the record through the disruptions already visible on the horizon is a question that will be answered not by scenario exercises but by the decisions that follow them.
Sources
https://www.nasa.gov/earth/earth-visualization-mapping/building-foresight-for-earth-science-featuring-lindsey-jacobson/
Corrections
If you believe this article contains an error, contact Herald Express with the source URL and supporting evidence.
Story synopsis gathered from: NASA News — source
