The SIR-C radar instrument was used to acquire data on two missions in 1994 aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor. This facility has 300 tapes containing data from those two flights. The CM-5 was the first supercomputer to arrive at EDC, in 1996, and has 32 processors and 24 GB of disk array. At the rear of this room are computer systems associated with Landsat 7, the latest in a series of Earth observation satellites first launched in the early 1970's. EDC receives data from the Landsat 7 satellite six times per day, with three contacts in the morning and three in the evening.
Data is downlinked, formatted, archived and made available to the public.
The data from the from Polar Ground Stations is sent here on Ampex DST tapes to process and archive. EOS will collect data through a series of satellites and field experiments to observe the Earth over the next 15 years. Each silo has 7 tape drives and can hold 5,500 tape cartridges. Each cartridge has a capacity of 50GB, for a total of 275 Terabytes per storage system. These units enable access to stored satellite information for individuals working around the world.