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.