NASA Awards RIT Funding to Advance Open Remote Sensing Research Through ROCX Field Campaigns

NASA has awarded Rochester Institute of Technology's Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Laboratory (DIRS) a three-year grant to host a community-driven remote sensing field campaign and publicly disseminate the resulting datasets to researchers, educators, and students worldwide.

The award recognizes the growing need for high-quality, well-characterized remote sensing datasets as new sensors, platforms, and measurement technologies continue to emerge. Ground-truthed observations are essential for validating remote sensing products, developing new algorithms, and advancing scientific understanding across a broad range of environmental and Earth observation applications.

The grant builds upon the success of the RIT Open Community eXperiment (ROCX) 2025 field campaign, which attracted significant attention from NASA's Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program. ROCX was developed to provide coincident measurements from ground, airborne, and spaceborne sensors while fostering collaboration across the remote sensing community.

In September 2025, RIT invited researchers from around the world to participate in ROCX 2025 at RIT's Tait Preserve. The campaign brought together 75 participants representing 24 organizations from six countries. During the experiment period, data were collected for 19 ground experiments using 14 ground-based instruments, eight uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms, two crewed aircraft, and seven satellite platforms. The resulting dataset provides a rich resource for sensor calibration and validation, algorithm development, and educational activities.

"As remote sensing technologies continue to evolve, there remains a continual need for carefully collected datasets with robust ground truth," said the ROCX leadership team. "These data enable researchers to evaluate emerging sensing modalities and ensure the accuracy and reliability of future remote sensing products." The newly funded effort led by Nina Raqueno and Emmett Ientilucci will support continued community engagement, data collection, curation, and public dissemination of ROCX datasets. Data products will be distributed through ESRI’s ArcGIS Enterprise through StoryMaps and Image Services.

The project will also support future field campaigns, including ROCX 2027, which will build on the lessons learned and scientific collaborations established during ROCX 2025.

Researchers and participants will reconvene at the ROCX Workshop on October 23, where ROCX 2025 teams will present preliminary results, share insights from their experiments, and begin planning for the next field campaign. A call for participation proposals will be announced in November.

The success of ROCX would not have been possible without the tremendous support of the staff at RIT's Tait Preserve, whose stewardship enabled the field activities, and RIT's Research Computing group, whose GLOBUS infrastructure is critical for managing and distributing the large volumes of data generated by the campaign.