The ESA-NASA Joint EO Mission Quality Assessment Framework – Towards a standardized data quality assessment process

The increasing availability of EO data products from a growing number of Commercial EO data providers within the New Space domain represents a great opportunity towards the implementation of a concept that has been discussed at CEOS-level for several years: a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

A key element towards the implementation of a GEOSS is undoubtedly data interoperability, by all means. This calls for new frameworks and tools to enable data quality and interoperability assessments, allowing a clear, standardized, process and output presentation.

ESA-side, the development of a quality and suitability assessment framework has started within the Earthnet Third Party Missions (TPM) realm, where candidate missions are assessed by the Earthnet Data Assessment Project (EDAP) team prior to integration, with a view to checking whether the mission stated requirements are met. The EDAP team has developed a successful reference set of guidelines, further instantiated by domain (Optical, SAR, DEM, Atmospheric Composition and others), with a view to harmonizing and standardizing the data quality assessments on a per-domain basis.

The EDAP Cal/Val Maturity Matrix and framework have been presented through international forums and conferences, having great success.

NASA-side, data quality assessments are carried out to support integration of commercial satellite data into Earth science research and applications at NASA. The NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program’s commercial data evaluation process provides critical benefits by ensuring that all acquired datasets meet rigorous scientific standards for accuracy, reliability, and interoperability. Through comprehensive assessments of radiometric and geometric quality, validation against trusted reference data, and transparent documentation requirements, NASA ensures that commercial data can be confidently integrated into research and applications. This approach builds trust in commercial partnerships, accelerates scientific progress, reduces duplication of effort, and promotes cost efficiency by leveraging existing high-quality data. Continuous monitoring further supports long-term integrity and fosters innovation within the Earth observation community

Within the frame of the ESA-NASA International Cooperation and Collaboration through Joint Groups and International Workshops attendance (mainly JACIE and VH-RODA), agreement on joint development and maintenance of the EDAP framework has been reached, officially framing the activity and the framework as an official ESA-NASA Framework. A 1^st official signature of the ESA-NASA guidelines for the SAR domain took place in 2024, and further signatures of guidelines covering the other domains are planned within the next years.

The aim of the ESA-NASA guidelines is to maintain an official, transparent and public framework dedicated to data quality assessments of candidate missions to both the TPM and CSDA programmes. At ESA, the guidelines are also used to carry out an operational assessment of missions within the Copernicus Contributing Missions scheme.

The Presentation will focus on the joint guidelines, its usage and main output, namely the Cal/Val Maturity Matrix, and future evolutions.