Open source data-driven discovery at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

SMAP will produce global maps of soil moisture, which will help improve our understanding of the Earth’s water and carbon cycles and our availability to manage water resources. As both a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) employee and a member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), I find it not only enlightening, but also utterly motivating to be involved in a foundational body like the ASF, so pervasive in its aspirations, and so unintentional in its mannerisms, that it can now claim a part success in powering the forefront of human understanding an exploration of the aforementioned science.