◾ Storing, Managing, and Analyzing Big Satellite Data: Experiences and Lessons Learned from a Real-World Application

In this chapter, we will (1) provide a case study on how the big satellite data (at the petabyte level) of the world’s largest satellite imagery distribution system is captured, stored, and managed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the US Geological Survey (USGS); (2) provide a unique example of how a changed policy could signicantly aect the traditional ways of storing, managing, and distributing Big Data, which will be quite dierent from typical commercial cases driven by sales; (3) discuss how does the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center swily overcome the challenges from serving few government laboratories to hundreds of thousands of global users; (4) discuss how are data visualization and data mining techniques used to analyze the characteristics of millions of requests and how can they be used to improve the performance, cost, and energy eciency of the EROS system; and (5) summarize the experiences and lessons that we learned from conducting this Big Data project in the past 4 years.