SAXTA aims to establish a simple way to enable projects to make their data available to the broader community. Within the community, there is a need for improved discovery of data holdings and new tools to search and order data. Based on new Earth science-focused peer-to-peer technology, the SAXTA system will address this need and extend the utilization of data sets that represent government investments of billions of dollars in systems and hardware development, and many millions of dollars in data purchases. Projects with large data purchases include the Landsat Pathfinder (Landsat 4 and 5), Landsat 7 for regional Land Cover and Land Use Change (LCLUC) programs, EOS Validation, and the Landsat Commercial Data Buys. The latter includes global orthorectified data coverage for the 1970s, circa 1990, and 2000.

Widespread user adoption of SAXTA will extend the societal benefits of these and other investments. We believe that if the cost in time and resources is low, and security is assured, then most community members would be willing to participate in a loosely coupled network such as SAXTA. To address this need, Michigan State University and the University of Maryland have partnered to develop and deploy such a system. The SAXTA system development project is sponsored by the NASA Applied Sciences Program and was selected for funding under the REASoN CAN. It is a crosscutting solution focused on improving access to high-resolution satellite datasets. The concept is that users will simply download free software that will allow them to register their data sets into the system and discover, search, and order datasets for free from others within the distributed, interoperable network.