A Path Towards Quantum-Computing-Assisted Earth Science Data Acquisition Tasking and Processing

Data collected by NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) missions help us better understand our planet. Past and present EOS missions have provided the scientific community a wealth of data and significant progress has been made on analysis capabilities that lead to scientific discovery as well as creating actionable information on both long- and short-term-time scales. A core objective of EOS is to monitor Earth on long-term time scales, but given the recent extreme events, such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, etc. there is an emerging need to focus on improving monitoring Earth System processes, extreme event evolution and impacts in near-real time to better meet the immediate needs of society. Providing the capability to coordinate and dynamically task a constellation of space-based and air-based assets in an agile fashion to better respond to changes driven by extreme events is highly desirable. This Early-Stage Technology (EST) proposal is focused on two major thrusts that build on the NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) team's expertise in quantum and classical optimization [BIS17,RIE19], the team's partnerships with quantum computing hardware developers, and NASA Ames' Earth Science expertise. The two thrusts of our proposal follow: (1) Optimizing data acquisition tasking: Identify triggers in Earth science datasets that lead to missing, noisy, or sparse datasets and develop quantum-assisted and classical approaches to optimize the allocation of earth science observational assets to dynamically respond to these historically derived triggers so future observations collected in support of the New Observing Strategies (NOS) thrust of AIST have sufficient measurements to ensure the datasets are complete (2) Roadmap for quantum-assisted EOS mission support: a roadmap for quantum computing in support of EOS missions will be developed. This roadmap will focus on developing quantum and quantum-classical hybrid approaches to addressing the challenges of data acquisition tasking and of data processing for EOS missions We believe there are multiple benefits to NASA from a successful completion of the program proposed above. First and foremost, it will support NASA in being "quantum-ready," develop valuable know-how on how and where to deploy quantum technologies on real, large-scale problems of interest to NASA's Earth Science Research Program, as well as gaining insights where quantum computation can provide computational advantage to the Earth Science community.

Advance Earth system science knowledge through the Identification, develop, and demonstrate innovative information systems technologies

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