NASA Openscapes Champions Program

NASA Openscapes Champions is a mentorship and professional development opportunity for research teams using data from NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) and interested in open science and migrating their analytical workflows to the cloud.

Join us for our 2025-2026 NASA Champions Series, details below.

Overview

Openscapes is an approach and a movement for doing better science in less time,. We help research groups reimagine data analysis, develop modern skills that are of immediate value to them, and cultivate collaborative research communities. Openscapes’ mentorship and community engagement approaches center on open data science as kinder science, enabling increased efficiency and resilience for teams so that their work has more enduring impact.

Openscapes Champions is a remote-by-design mentorship program for environmental and Earth science research teams to explore open data science practices. For NASA Openscapes, participants also spend time experimenting and planning what their analytical workflows with NASA Earthdata look like in the Cloud.

NASA Openscapes is a project to support scientists using data from NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) as they migrate workflows to the cloud. As part of this work, we will offer the Openscapes Champions program several times from 2024-2026.

Champions Program Details

Our goals continue to be to expand knowledge and use of NASA Earthdata, building on momentum behind the earthaccess python library and workflows in the Cloud.

In Fall 2025 we will lead 1 Community Call + 1 Coworking session: a welcome to NASA Earthdata and earthaccess. Participants can participate at the level they choose - on either the Community Call, or the Coworking session, or both.

  • Dates: November 13 & 14, 2025
  • Times: 10:00am - 1:00 pm Pacific Time
  • Where: remotely, via Zoom
  • Cost: Free; this opportunity is supported by NASA funding to Openscapes

Registration

Register here: Coming mid-October.

Continuing in Winter 2026

We are trying something different in 2025-2026. We are modifying the traditional Champions structure to be more light-weight so that participants can engage at whatever level they can (rather than the full cohort-based model of usual Champions programs). Following the Fall 2025 events, in Winter 2026 we will lead a 4-Part Series of Community Calls and Coworking sessions, likely February - April. Details and registration coming by November 2025.

Learn more

Learn more about the Openscapes Champions Program, NASA Openscapes News, stories from previous cohorts, and FAQs about forming your team. Questions? Contact Openscapes: julia at openscapes.org

2024 NASA Champions Cohort

Meet the 9 science teams who participated in the 2024 NASA Champions Cohort, and learn more about their work in this blog post: Data strategies for when to use cloud, coding strategies for parallelization, & first examples of big science in the Cloud

2023 NASA Champions Cohort

Meet the 7 science teams who participated in the 2023 NASA Champions Cohort, and learn more about their work in this blog post: Exciting Progress for Research Teams using NASA Earthdata in the Cloud: 2023 NASA Openscapes Champions Wrap-up

2022 NASA Champions Cohort

Meet the 10 science teams who participated in the 2022 NASA Champions Cohort, and learn more about their work in this blog post: From downloading data to Cloud access: NASA Openscapes Champions Wrap-up