three satellite missions that spurred the science community into envisioning this facility. The launch of ADEOS-1 resulted in ASF simultaneously supporting four active missions until the loss of the two Japanese missions (ADEOS-1 in 1996 and JERS-1 in 1998), and the deactivation of ERS-1 with the launch of ERS-2 in 1996. In November 2002, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) appointed UAF as agent for the data acquisition, processing, and distribution to support the Japanese Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) mission, which featured Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR). With the successful launch of ALOS in January 2006, ASF’s Americas ALOS Data Node (AADN) became operational in October that same year when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) declared the ALOS mission operational. The satellite functioned for five years. Data center The ASF DAAC provides production, archiving and distribution to the scientific community of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data products and tools from active and past missions. The facility is one of 12 theme-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) earth science data centers in the nation known as NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs). The DAACs are major components of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), which in turn is part of NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program. The Alaska Satellite Facility is the only DAAC that focuses on SAR. It is also the U.S. archive for Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B (a European Space Agency mission), European Remote Sensing Satellite 1 and 2 (ERS 1/ERS 2), the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite 1 (JERS 1), RADARSAT 1 and the Japanese Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) mission, which featured Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR). Due to the agreements with many of the foreign agencies involved, at first much of the foreign-source DAAC data was restricted distribution to NASA-approved scientists only. But in 2015, the ALOS PALSAR data became unrestricted, and the Sentinel-1 data is also unrestricted. In June 2013, the Alaska Satellite Facility released newly processed, 35-year-old data from the 1978 Seasat satellite mission. Before this release, only 20 percent of the Seasat SAR data had been processed digitally. Satellite-tracking ground station As a receiving station for satellite data, the facility now operates three antennas on behalf of NASA: two 11-meter S/X band antennas and one 9-meter S/X-band. The second antenna was installed in 1994, in anticipation of the launch of the Advanced Earth Observing