We’ve all heard about NASA, and just hearing it conjures images of astronauts taking space walks and astrophysicists expanding the limits of human understanding of the universe. But NASA is a lot more than that. A lot of the things we take for granted are going to be changed forever by the amazing stuff they’re working on right now. At the heart of all these is data, and this is what we’re going to learn today. In this episode, Dr. Awesome sits down with Kevin Murphy, the Chief Data Science Officer for NASA, to explore the world of data science and NASA’s essential role in collecting and sharing a treasure trove of scientific data. Kevin shares insights into how NASA manages the vast amount of information generated by missions and instruments, the impact of freely accessible data on scientific breakthroughs, and the transformative role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in analyzing complex datasets. Join in as they delve into the future of data science, the exciting upcoming missions to the Moon, and the positive trends in environmental consciousness that offer hope for a brighter future.

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#future, #futureisbright, #NASAData, #NASA, #datascience

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The Future Of NASA’s Data – A Conversation With Kevin Murphy

In this episode, we have Kevin Murphy, who’s the Chief Data Science Officer for NASA. He’s done a lot of cool things with all of the information that NASA produces on a general basis. Kevin, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got to where you are, and what you’re doing.

Thanks for having me. This is a great opportunity to discuss a lot of things that NASA is doing. You have an interesting show here. My responsibility is to help manage all the scientific data that comes from about 150 or so missions and instruments that NASA launches into space. That data is an incredibly vital resource for understanding new scientific areas but also monitoring our climate and our planet, looking beyond our solar system to the distant galaxies, and understanding what goes on here at home.

I started this job many years ago. I originally came from an Earth Science background where I used data to do land cover remote sensing, which is looking at how forested areas change, how deforestation occurs, where it occurs, why it occurs, and what the impacts are on the climate. NASA collects a lot of interesting information.

A cool part about what NASA does is that they make all of that data freely and openly available. We’ve been doing that for a long period because what we need are a lot of people to be able to look at that information, make discoveries, and be able to make decisions, especially when we talk about Earth Science information.

One of the things that we had talked about a little bit was the amount of data that NASA processes. The term was Petabytes. Give me an idea of how much information that is. What is the quantifiable term for a real-world understanding? Are we talking about the same amount of data that Amazon processes? How much data is that?

 

 

It’s a lot of data. If you try to capture it in terms of libraries, there would be libraries covering the entire surface of the Earth with that information in it. This is a high-quality scientific information. In commercial areas like Amazon or Netflix, a bunch of other people collect a lot of information. In many cases, they collect much more volume but that data isn’t necessarily scientific information. It is about commerce, what you spend, where you are, and how you get better marketing. We have a lot of data. It’s very exquisite data but also publicly available.

It is difficult for an organization like NASA to process that amount. You’ve allowed the public to have free access to it. Can you name some instances where the public has helped out in advancing scientific causes?

We launch missions primarily to collect information because we don’t go to Mars or the outer planets of our solar system. The primary deliverable of these missions that we launch, all of that engineering, aerospace work, and the communications activities that we do, is to bring this data back. We have good ideas of what we think we’re going to find with that information.

We develop a mission concept and that might be like, “We want to go collect samples from an asteroid and bring them back to Earth for analysis.” We know the basic things that we’ll likely find in that information that we bring back. However, there are so many other things out there that people haven’t discovered with that same information.

You can use gravity measurements, for instance, around the Earth to understand how the water cycle works and how climate change influences the storage of water in different areas. We didn’t know that before. We launched the mission to do gravity fields. Those gravity fields came back and they were like, “Why are they changing?” They said, “They’re changing because you’re moving mass in the form of water around the Earth part of the water cycle.” That’s one good example.

Other examples are things like citizen science activities where we help categorize the types of galaxies by their shape using some web tools that allow people to help scientists classify galaxies in ways that we couldn’t do before. The big part about making our information public is that people with innovative ideas can come up with new types of research and applications that we can’t come up with internally for NASA alone. We don’t have enough time or money to process all the data in all the different ways that can potentially be done. The community helps us do that.

We don’t have enough time or money to process all the data in all the different ways that can potentially be done. The community helps us do that.

I grew up in Florida. We went to Cape Canaveral. I saw the rocket launches and stuff like that. People have this idea of NASA as an all-seeing and all-knowing organization because of the cutting-edge technology that you deal with. It’s still such a small part of the US government that it’s very easy to forget that it is limited by the amount of people and the amount of money that you’re talking about.

The amount of information is overwhelming. One person would be lost in the amount of information that you guys are processing regularly. I do like the fact that you are opening it up to everyone. Do you know of any real-world examples where people have made some breakthroughs or have pushed the field forward based on the data that you guys were able to collect and freely distribute?

They happen all the time, which is part of the problem. For instance, we have an early release program with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is where the data that come down are immediately available to anybody for any purpose. A team of international researchers took that information and used it to make the first detections of CO2 in the atmosphere of exo-climate. That’s amazing. That happened.

It was a huge team of international participants, local, domestic, and all sorts of different people. They used Slack to do their communications. They developed the software on GitHub. They were able to collaborate across continents and time zones to analyze this information and make a discovery that had never been made before with a brand new instrument.

Our products are freely and openly available but they’re also very sophisticated products. You’re trying to do science with these things. You could have spectrometers and different types of measurement techniques, which takes some skill to do. Part of what we try to do is not only to make our products open but to provide the tools necessary to do some of that and some of the training as well because you need to empower people to learn how to do this. It usually takes a PhD or some electrical engineering degree or something to get the initial stuff together.

Once you do that work, then you can make it more available to more people. You can provide them with the data science, techniques, and tools that they can run either on their computers or cloud environments to process that information. It’s hard work but it’s useful work. We’ve seen other people use Earth Science information, for instance. We have a mission called Terra, which launched in 1999. On it, there is this thing called the moderate resolution imaging spectrometer, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a good camera. It looks at the entire surface of the Earth once a day in the daytime and once a day at nighttime.

One of the things that has on it are thermal channels. Those thermal channels can detect things like forest fires of a certain intensity. What we’ve seen with that is that people can take where it detects a fire potentially. Many years ago, we set up a service that said, “If we detect a fire, we will send people an SMS message for the geography that they’re interested in.” We got a lot of people from Africa that were like, “We can use this to help us fight these forest fires or land cover fires so that they don’t burn down habitat.”

People can use this information, especially the Earth Science information, for agriculture so they can look at water stress and plants. People have been using this information to look at air quality measurements. The commercial industry is using our measurement of Chlorophyll A and B to evaluate where they should fish in the oceans. There are a lot of different use cases that we’ve seen out there. In Earth Science alone, we have about $3 million unique users of the data per year. It’s hard to put your finger on one single thing that people do.

It’s nice to hear that the community is so large. If you’re a young kid and you get involved with this thing, it’s nice to have other people that are doing it, and you talk to and stuff like that. It’s always nice to be in a community of like-minded people. That’s what drives innovation forward. What I like is what everybody thinks about NASA is us looking out but so much of it is us looking at the Earth itself. What is cool is we didn’t have that understanding many years ago before all this satellite technology. Is all of the technology that GPS has built on based on NASA information? Does the topographical information when you’re in Google Maps come from you or the private industry?

 

 

There are a couple of different things in the statement you made. The first thing is GPS is a navigation system. That was launched, not by NASA but by a military technology that was valuable for everybody. That’s why we use it in our cars and everything. We also use it on satellites. We use GPS receivers on satellites to figure out where they are in the sky. NASA doesn’t do that. We use it. It’s a very important thing.

I have a separate thought about GPS. I’ll come back to that in a second because you can do some amazing things with it. Google Maps and Google Earth’s satellite overlay is an amalgamation or a combination of both commercial and public information. When we look at the high spatial resolution thing, like you can see your car in your driveway, those are typically commercial products that they purchased and can then display.

You launch in space.

They may have launched them into space. As you zoom out on the higher-level products, they are updated more frequently in terms of time. Those are typically from government agencies like NASA or our European partners at the European Space Agency. They have good measurement techniques as well. To go back to GPS for a second, we all use GPS in our cars to say, “How do we get to the next Starbucks,” which is great. It’s made our lives more efficient.

What we don’t realize is that the signals from GPS can go through the atmosphere, get deflected, and come out the other side of the atmosphere. Through special satellite antennas on very small satellites, typically, you can capture that information and that information can tell you incredible things that we never would’ve thought of when the first GPS satellites were launched.

You can use it to look at soil moisture, for instance. You can look at a planetary boundary layer, which is a spot in the atmosphere that is important to how the atmospheric mixing happens. You can look at sea ice freeboard, which is the height of ice above the water, like in an iceberg. There are these amazing techniques people have been able to develop based on information that was never thought that they could do. I can only imagine that there are many more of those types of discoveries to be made.

Do you think that that’s a function of our better understanding of that information or is it more like that sensor technology has rapidly advanced over the past years?

GPS has been around since the late ‘80s or mid-‘90s. You’ve got to advance a theoretical component and then test it in the lab and outside of the lab. You’ve got to be able to do that. A critical component of it is making that information open because there are so many people out there with potentially interesting ideas. If you say, “We have this expert group,” and everything that that expert group does isn’t shareable, you lose a lot of the benefit of collecting that information.

We talked a little bit about this one particular aspect of NASA. There are five different divisions. Can you tell our readers about all of those five divisions? Everybody focuses on the ability to put people on the moon or go to Mars and stuff like that. You are doing a lot of stuff outside of that.

My word first is that NASA is all about discovery. Whether that’s the discovery of new engineering techniques, new aeronautic techniques, or exploration techniques to get people to go places, we’re about that. Within NASA, we certainly have our human space flight areas and aeronautics areas. We have this large directorate called the Science Mission Directorate. Within the Science Mission Directorate, we have five divisions.

NASA is all about discovery, whether that’s the discovery of new engineering techniques, new aeronautic techniques, or exploration techniques to get people to go places.

Those five divisions look at a lot of different things. The one division looks at the sun. It’s called the Heliophysics Division. What they do is look at space weather, the sun, and how the sun evolves. Maybe you’ve seen the Parker Solar Probe in the news. That’s orbiting the sun and getting closer and closer until it reaches its fiery death. It’s making incredible discoveries about how that system works. The sun is a very important star for us. It’s my favorite.

Not only does that power how the Earth’s ecosystems work but it will power how we explore the solar system. You can look at different types of environments where the sun could be very dangerous to humans that are exploring. We need to understand a lot of those dynamics. That’s the Heliophysics Division. We’ve got the Planetary Science Division, which looks at all of the planets in the solar system. Their job is to go and discover new things about Mars, Venus, Saturn, and so on.

They send the rovers. If you’ve seen the Mars Rovers, those all come out of that division. We do lunar exploration as well with that. We have a thing called the BPS or the Biological and Physical Sciences branch. They look at how human systems or biological systems change while they’re in space. We have experiments on the space station that they use to look at all sorts of different things, whether that’s from growing plants to how mice do different activities.

We have the Earth Science Division, which we’ve talked a bit about. That’s the one I’m most familiar with. I’ve worked there for many years before I took on this job. They look at all the systems of the Earth and how they change and interact over time. Finally, we’ve got the Astrophysics Division, which looks beyond the solar system. It looks at galaxies and their formation. People might know things like the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope as big examples of those. They’re pushing back our understanding of the universe to as early as we can.

I would be remiss if I did not talk about a few of the hot topics that the internet is ablaze about. One of them is the conspiracy theory about aliens and all of this other stuff that is in the news. In the UAP community, they’re talking a lot about the fact that NASA used to look at the sea and the oceans but then they stopped looking at it. I want to get your take on that because that’s something that people think is concerning. There are some spaceships under the ocean floor. You were in the Earth Sciences Division. You were taking a look at this stuff. Tell us a little bit about your take on all that.

All of our data is freely and openly available. If you Google something called NASA Worldview, you can see the data that we collect every day in a Google Maps format. That Google Maps format is updated every day. If you’re interested in looking and discovering that type of information, go take a look. We have a lot of different missions that collect data globally and some that point very narrowly to get higher resolution information. It’s all out there. It’s all open. We encourage you to use it.

Worldview makes it a very easy format to view. You can pan, zoom, put 600 or 700 layers, overlay them together, and see changes over time. We certainly see a lot of usage of that tool but go take a look. It’s an incredible planet that you should be able to see where your backyard is. Go out there. Take a look. If you find something interesting, let us know.

Are we looking at anything below the surface of the ocean or is it mainly taking a look at everything that you can see from space?

It’s what you can see from space. It’s hard to look underneath the ocean unless you’re running a ship or a submarine. We’re primarily a space-based agency. There are other agencies that look at the oceans, like NOAA or the Navy, and folks like that. We don’t look under the ocean too much unless we have a very specific reason to do so, which would be if we’re trying to monitor glacial runoff and how that interacts with the oceans, or understand a physical process like Greenland where the ice sheets are melting. There’s a buoyancy between salt water and fresh water, which is changing the circulation in that area. I haven’t found anything there besides ice.

It is crazy how popular this stuff is. It’s a good and bad thing in the fact that it gets people jazzed about science and our place in the universe. They look at this stuff with a very fine-tooth comb they might have ignored in the past. I’m sure that with the number of public speaking engagements and stuff that you’ve had to do, you’ve had people come to you with flat Earth conspiracies or stuff like that. That stuff is out there on the internet. People like you who are sifting through the data need to start talking about this stuff because that stuff is out there and it’s not going away. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a lot of buzz about the mission to the moon that is coming up. Are they still on track for that or did they push it back?

I’ve got to remember or look at exactly what the timeline is for that.

I saw the interview that the four astronauts that were selected did on one of the late-night talk shows. They were impressive. It was so awe-inspiring that I started crying. I was so happy that we were going back to the moon but these were the people that were leading it. What are you doing in preparation for that? The amount of data I’m sure that you’re going to be getting back from that is going to be huge and you don’t want any hiccups.

We have a portfolio of activities going on related to them. One of the big ones or the ones that people see is the Artemis launch. In fall 2024, there’s going to be a test flight with astronauts to go around. That’s supposed to be about a ten-day mission. We’re actively preparing everything we can to do that. That’s a lot of engineering testing, although there will be some opportunities for some science. We’re also working with the commercial industry to launch scientific payloads to the surface of the moon, look at all sorts of different things, and test out how we work with the commercial industry as we make that next step.

We’ll have a lot of data from the moon but what you might not know is that we already have a lot of information from the moon. We have this one measurement or instrument called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or LRO. It hasn’t been orbiting the moon for decades. It’s got a very high-resolution camera on it. It’s got lidar techniques, which allow you to take the graphic information.

When they launched it, we might want to go back and take a look at this. It’s a camera that had a booster. You have to boost it out there with the second or third stage. What they decided to do was crash the booster into the moon so it would come up with a dust plume, and then they could use LRO to image that dust plume to see what the composition of the dust was.

Is LRO a lidar?

It’s got a couple of different instruments on it. I think it has a lidar or maybe it’s a radar. It’s got a spectrometer on it. They were able to crash it. The satellite is orbiting. They were able to launch this thing and have the satellite in the right position to see it illuminated by the sun and then take an image of it so they could see the mineral composition of the dust.

That’s in orbit. That’s freely available to people that they want to look at. Can you see the light side and the dark side of the moon?

It’s the light side of the moon. A lot of the instruments we have are what we call passive instruments. They don’t have their energy source like a camera versus a camera with a flash. We don’t have a giant flash on a big part of that.

This power would be an issue when you’re dealing with something that’s going to be on the surface or in orbit for years. That’s understandable. The other thing that I wanted to talk with you about is you have all this data coming in. There are so many different things happening with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and stuff like that. Are you leveraging that to sift through this data?

Absolutely, and we do it in a lot of different ways. Some of which are interesting to external people and some of which are interesting to internal people. Artificial intelligence has ebbed and flowed for many years. Many years ago, there was a big push for machine learning and deep learning. That was critical for us. We were able to use those techniques to do things like monitor, find dust in different imagery, and look for similar types of forms and imagery.

The problem with it was that estimating hurricane intensity is much more quickly from imagery taken of the hurricane than you could do through modeling runs. We could estimate within pretty reasonable accuracy within about fifteen minutes of the data coming down what the hurricane intensity would be. The problem with all those techniques was that they took an immense amount of training data and were typically human-curated. Although sometimes there were machine-curated, training data sets like tens of thousands of things all labeled properly.

Over the past few years, there’s been a technique called Transformer architecture that you may or may not be familiar with but it’s a thing that powers the large language models. If you think of ChatGPT, Bard, or any of those big ones, that’s the underlying technique that allows it to do the work. In language, you give it a whole bunch of sentences and then you say later, “Can you tell me what the next word in the sentence should be,” and then it generates a word.

It turns out that you can use a very similar type of technique, although it’s slightly different, to look through geospatial data and stacks of images taken at the same place at the same time of day over subsequent days. You can use that with smaller training data labels to parse through that information quickly. Let’s say you’re interested in flooding in Arkansas. You can develop a model over all of the United States. Once you run the model through the machine learning and AI capabilities, you can then use a small amount of training dataset and identify floods over the entire US at different periods.

It speeds up the ability to process that information and it does so in ways that we didn’t think were possible. Every four days, our partners at ISS image the Earth at 30-meter spatial resolution. That’s looking at the field scale. You’re not going to see an individual house but you’ll be able to see neighborhoods, roads, and those types of imagery. We do the entire landmass of the Earth every four days at that spatial resolution. It’s a lot of data. It’s terrible.

Trends are being picked up. Let’s say you worked in deforestation. Are there some trends that you could tell us that might make us hopeful for the future? I feel like so much of how we look at the environment is so negative. Everybody thinks that we’re going on this downward path. They’re cleaning up the Pacific garbage patch. We have this new focus on deforestation in general. People have much more environmental consciousness than they’ve ever had in the past. When I was growing up, there was a time when recycling wasn’t even available. What are some trends that you’re getting from all this data that might make us a little bit more hopeful about the future?

One of the trends is people have access to information they didn’t have access to before. They’ve got it at backyard scales. They can start to use this information in their decision-making process. They can start to see how they might be able to adapt or mitigate those activities that they’re vulnerable to, moving, changing infrastructure, or building better buildings. These are all things that are facilitated by collecting information. The most hopeful thing I have is that we have people who are interested in this and have access to this information.

People now have access to information they didn’t have access to before. They can use this information in their decision-making process.

They’re trying to come up with incredible ways to deal with it, whether that’s making us more efficient, better planning of where we put things, better management of the resources that we have, and better transparency into what people are doing. Those trends are incredibly important. The recognition that there needs to be equity, access, and diverse input into how we make those decisions is also very encouraging. The future is very bright with this.

 

 

I like to think of it as everybody has in their pocket the entire capability of knowledge that had ever come before. If you want to start up a garden, you can have a to-do list of things to do from your garden and make it fruitful on your first attempt. That gives me a lot of hope. The ability to scale any knowledge base application up very quickly is very significant. I don’t think that we’ve had that in the past. When I was growing up, we had to go to the library if we wanted to learn something.

I don’t think that the internet was as accessible as it is now. My child can talk to the internet and learn something from it. I’m interested in seeing what the data for everything shows us. We’ve had the ability to collect data but it’s only now that we’re having the new technologies available to us to sift through that data and gain insight from it, which is going to be cool over the next years.

I did want to ask you the three questions that I asked all of my guests because we went down a few different fields. The first thing that I always ask is, where do you gain inspiration from? For me, it’s science fiction. I look at things like Star Trek and having this utopian vision of the future. It’s something that I want to enjoy. I want to live in a future where we have robot butlers or food for everyone and stuff like that.

I am a big science fiction fan as well. A lot of my inspiration comes from the environment. I’m an avid sailor. I like to camp, hike, and fish. That brings home to me how important the environment is and how we need to be sensitive to it. I like to marry the technical aspect of the work that we do with the grounding in the value, the places I find valuable. It’s that marriage that makes it happy for me. That’s where I got my inspiration and recharged from.

Being in the data science field, have you read any of the cyberpunk genre or anything like that at all?

A little bit here and there. I can’t even remember all the books.

The reason why I’m saying it is because there’s this future that they envision where data is freely available. There’s no privacy anymore and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s something that gives a lot of people, at the ground level, access to things they otherwise might not be able to, especially with you dealing with data science. There are two schools of thought when it comes to data. It should be hoarded or given that way freely. Based on everything that you’re saying, you’re very much of the camp that it should be given away freely.

For the vast majority of information that we collect scientifically, it should be given away freely. There are significant data privacy questions as well. I don’t want all my medical information being given away for free, pay information, or tax information. Within reason, we need to make sure the data is open and available. If you have any good book suggestions, I’m happy to take them. I am always looking for stuff.

We’ll talk after and I’ll give you some good ideas and things that’ll blow your mind. Another thing that I wanted to talk with you about is from a macroscopic view, I feel like this is the time to be at NASA. 1960 was an exciting time. We’re going to the moon and doing all this stuff. It lost popularity for a while but, especially with you guys going back to the moon, there’s this huge buzz. Do you feel that daily? Do you see that excitement as opposed to years ago? From the outside, I see that but I don’t know for you who is living and going into the office. Are you experiencing that excitement as well?

One of the coolest things I get to do is go out to the NASA centers or the community, talk with them, and work with them. The buzz is real. People are excited. People are doing hard work. They’re motivated to do it. NASA has always had a good mission. It has excited a lot of people. If any of your readers are interested in a dynamic and difficult but rewarding career path, there are so many different opportunities at NASA. They should come and apply.

NASA has always had a good mission. It’s a dynamic and difficult but rewarding career path, and there are so many different opportunities here.

I look at the first space race as something that had such profound effects on society at large. Neil deGrasse Tyson has an interesting talk about even the fins of the rockets trickled down to the cars. It permeated public consciousness. We’re on the verge of that moment again with the next one. I feel like it would be an exciting place to work. It’s in the same way my friends who live here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who are graduating from MIT want to work at Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, and all these different companies that are changing society as we know it.

I feel like NASA is on the verge of that. You get somebody on the moon again and the whole world is watching the event. It’s going to be a fun and exciting company to work for. The last thing I ask everybody is, where do you see NASA in ten years from 2023? Hopefully, we’re on the moon. What else is down the pipeline that you hope to see happen?

 

 

There’s a lot that we can still learn at NASA. From the science mission directorate side, I hope that we have a lot of new missions that help people understand the Earth better. I hope that we discover more about the moon and Mars. I hope that we make the next giant discoveries about the origins of the universe and we will. We have people, capabilities, and support throughout the community to do that.

Within data science specifically, though, it’s going to be a lot easier for people to interact with petabytes or potentially exabytes of information, which is an incredibly large amount of data. You’re going to be able to do that through natural language prompts and interaction. We’ll have a more equitable and easily accessible set of Earth Science, planetary science, and heliophysics information that people can interact with and tailor to their local needs or specific questions.

 

 

On NASA aside, where do you see data science in many years? You have all these visions of the future like you’re going to have your assistant that curates your life for you and other views of AI being this overlord that treats us like sheep. I’m pretty excited about all of the different applications for the data that’s going to be coming.

I would love for my life to be looked at the way that you guys are looking at the world and knowing the exact amount of calories that I’m taking in so I don’t have to log it on my phone or the amount of liquid that I’ve drunk to make sure that I’m at my proper hydration levels. Hopefully, AI can manage that. Where do you see data science ten years from 2023? Is it going to be something like that or some other version of the future?

We’re going to get more information and be interested to see how we can make it work to better our lives and increase our knowledge. I’ve got a watch that tells me a lot of stuff but I can’t wait until it tells me more. Maybe it will also tell me, “You’ve been outside too much. The air quality is too bad.” Data science is going to be able to put those pieces together and allow people to have more agency over the decisions that they make and understand the impacts of those decisions. Ultimately, if data science works out properly, driving will be safer and productivity will be increased substantially.

I already see that with some people. I’ve got a teenager who uses ChatGPT a little too much for school but it teaches them how to think sometimes. We’ve got to be careful that we don’t have too much bias in those types of systems but we have to embrace them as well because that is the future. The future is more information at your fingertips to make better decisions.

That’s a great sentence to leave it on. Thank you so much for speaking with me, Kevin. Readers, please like and subscribe. We will see you all in the future. Have a great day, everybody.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• NASA

 

About Kevin Murphy

Kevin Murphy is the Chief Science Data Officer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. In this capacity, he works across five divisions to advance the state of the art in cloud computing, machine learning, data management and analysis platforms for NASA’s scientific data, and advocates for open science for all of NASA.

Before assuming his current role, Mr. Murphy served as the Program Executive for Earth Science Data Systems programs and the System Architect for EOSDIS, one of the largest repositories of Earth observing data on the planet. He managed the production and distribution of data from NASA’s fleet of over 20 Earth-Observing satellites and instruments including near real-time science data production systems, search engines, scientific data visualization system, evaluation of commercial data, and earthdata.nasa.gov.

Mr. Murphy has received numerous awards, including the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement for Engineering, Charles S. Falkenberg Award, Fed 100, among others.