NASA's GLOBE Mission Earth project has partnered with Langley Research Center to enhance how students engage with satellite land cover data during the 2025-2026 school year. The initiative brings together educators from the Science Activation Program in a specialized Community of Practice focused on improving data literacy and hands-on Earth observation skills.

The program leverages three major satellite systems. MODIS, aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua spacecraft, provides global land surface observations at 250-meter resolution every one to two days. Landsat, a joint NASA-USGS mission operating since 1972, delivers 30-meter resolution imagery across decades of Earth's surface. Sentinel-2, part of the European Copernicus program, offers 10-meter resolution multispectral data. Together, these sensors create a layered view of planetary land cover patterns and changes.

GLOBE Mission Earth translates this satellite infrastructure into classroom activities. Students collect ground-truth data while simultaneously analyzing overhead imagery, bridging the gap between local observations and global patterns. Teachers participating in the Community of Practice refine curricula to help students extract meaning from massive datasets, identify land cover types, and track environmental shifts over time.

The Community of Practice model clusters educators around shared learning objectives. Langley Research Center guides participants through best practices in data interpretation, helping them address common student misconceptions about satellite imagery resolution, data processing workflows, and the physical basis for spectral signatures that distinguish forests from agricultural land from urban areas.

This work supports broader NASA priorities. The agency's Earth science division relies on citizen science and student engagement to build future scientists and informed decision-makers. By training educators now, NASA amplifies the reach of its land cover products. Students gain direct access to the same datasets informing climate models, land management policy, and biodiversity assessments.

GLOBE participants connect classroom science to real-world applications. Students see