NASA IMPACT

About

IMPACT (Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team) is part of NASA's Earth Science Data Systems Program, based at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It prototypes new technologies — including machine learning and AI — to maximize the scientific return of NASA's Earth observation data and improve data discovery and stewardship. Its work spans foundation models, STAC catalogs and data-management best practices.

Notable: Collaborated with IBM Research on geospatial AI foundation models.

What I worked on

• Drove a 30% increase in data delivery speed to clients through the implementation of the new Tasking Management System, significantly improving data ingestion and request handling for the NASA CSDA program.
• Initiated and built an agent-based data search project leveraging LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) using LangChain and LangGraph, enabling users to intelligently search and retrieve specific data from a massive STAC metadata catalog.
• Developed a RAG-based automatic metadata file generator for the CSDA program, utilizing local LLM models with Weaviate and ChromaDB as vector databases and maintaining a knowledge graph for NASA Spatiotemporal Asset Catalog compliance.
• Managed scalable infrastructure across AWS (S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda, Step Functions) to ensure a robust and highly available system using technologies including Next.js and FastAPI.
• Implemented data ingestion pipelines for new vendors, including Satellogic and Maxar DEM, within the CSDA system.
• Developed and pioneered the new NASA CSDA tasking management system, utilizing a Django/Airflow backend and a React and TypeScript frontend to manage commercial satellite data requests and ingestion.