Establishing a multi-mission information processing and analysis system for supporting global change research - the EOS Data and Information System

The first operational version of the Data and Information System for the NASA´s Earth Science Enterprise will be released during 1999. This will be the world´s largest civilian data management system for remotely sensed data. Although it is a very high throughput, distributed data system, perhaps the key challenge in developing the system was the requirement to handle more than 900 different data types with the minimum of reconfiguration. The architectural features, which facilitate this multi-mission capability, and the lessons learned during the implementation and deployment of these features, are described in this paper