Across NASA’s many missions, thousands of scientists, engineers, and other experts and professionals all over the country are doing what they do best, but now from home offices and via video conferencing.
With most personnel supporting missions remotely to keep onsite staff at a minimal level in response to COVID-19, the Agency is moving ahead strongly with everything from space exploration to using our technology and innovation to help inform policy makers.
NASA is studying whether there are long-term responses from our planet caused by changes in human activity patterns due to COVID-19 quarantines. In the short-term, our satellites provide objective, accurate, and timely information on national and global food supplies that will help support USDA, USAID, and the global agencies that oversee food security. Scientists can track air quality changes, such as the drop in nitrogen dioxide, a major air pollutant, over major metropolitan areas around the world. Seeing Earth’s lights at night also helps researchers track patterns in energy use and human activity around the planet.
Responding to the White House’s call to action to develop new technology and data mining approaches that could help the research community address COVID-19 science questions, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California used artificial intelligence and natural language technologies to extract medical diagnoses, medical conditions, and drug and disease information from a database of 25,000+ publications. The information helps shed light on transmission, incubation, and environmental stability of the virus; what has been published about medical care for those affected; what we know about COVID-19 risk factors; and what we know about non-pharmaceutical interventions. The data was made available to the research community on March 23.
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