Andy Anderson (00:05):

Welcome to this Alaska Satellite Facility podcast. The Alaska Satellite Facility is a NASA distributed active Archive center or dak. This means we collect, archive and distributed satellite data for scientists to use. Our goal at ASF is to provide you with the best tools for discovering and using satellite data, especially synthetic aperture radar data known as SAR data. Our web application, Vertex is your source for SAR data and on-demand processing of SAR data. You can find Vertex on the web at https s slash slash search dot ASF alaska.edu. In this episode, we provide a brief update on what's new in Vertex for November, 2022. I'm your host, Andy Anderson. I'm the web designer for Vertex. And in this episode I'll be chatting with Greg Short, the data discovery product owner here at asf. Let's join the conversation and find out what's new with Vertex. 

Greg Short (01:11):

Sure. So we have a few fun new tools that are available in Vertex. In particular, I would mention our download manager. It's been a long-term pain point for people that downloading these large numbers of products, these long lists of things that people need to do, their science has been difficult. And usually it's involved external tools or browser plugins, things like that. And what we've managed to do is provide a builtin tool in Vertex that doesn't require any extra software. You just need to be running Chrome and it does all the downloads automatically. You queue up everything you want and you just hit that button and it will work through all the different files you have. Very smoothly and conveniently. We've gotten a lot of good feedback about that. Highly recommend checking that one out. We do have help videos on that one in particular to help you learn how to use that and get through any questions you may have there. 

Andy Anderson (02:08):

Yeah, I think people will love that. I know that's been out there for a while and that's really slick if people 

Greg Short (02:14):

See it. And we have some internal users at ASF that are super fond of that particular feature. We get a lot of positive feedback there. So far, so good. And love to hear from external users too that are working through these same processes. So Download Manager, definitely my top pick for what's new with Vertex. You mm-hmm. 

Andy Anderson (02:34):

<affirmative>. Cool. What else is 

Greg Short (02:35):

Happening? So we have on demand products available through Vertex. This is through the hype system. You can order custom products if you have some specific area you're looking at and you don't wanna deal with figuring out how to do all the processing steps, maybe you would need to do RTC processes terrain correction maybe you wanna run interferometry. These processes can be very difficult and they can be very time consuming and computationally expensive. And computer time means money. And so we have provided these tools built into Vertex. You can simply pick the products you want specify the processing parameters, and hit go. And a little while later you get your products just ready to go, ready for analysis. 

Andy Anderson (03:28):

And I always saw that feature as adding a lot of functionality in places that you couldn't do it before. You can use your cell phone or your tablet and now kick off processes that work with large amounts of data and do it from a mobile 

Greg Short (03:44):

Device. Yeah, absolutely. All of the stuff that we offer in Vertex is available and supported on mobile platforms. It could be your phone, it could also be a tablet Do cloud processing of Instar data on your iPad. Right? That's kind of a game changer, I think. And it's funny because when we're at conferences and we talk to people and say, Hey, you should check out Vertex. Look at this cool new thing I got. The first thing they do is they open it on their phone and try to get into it with their phone. And historically that's not gone well with Vertex as we have it now. And some of these tools that we offer through it, it's incredibly powerful and convenient and available. So stepping away from Vertex a little bit, we have our Python search module. It's called ASF Search, and that's available through PI and Con. 

Greg Short (04:28):

And the goal of ASF search is to take all the workflows that people know and have designed using Vertex or similar tools and move those to programmatic Python with just a few lines of code. We've worked really hard to help scientists or software developers avoid reinventing all these wheels for processing data. And I think ASF Search does that. You can absolutely go from zero to data on disc, doing the search, doing the refinement, doing in sar, stacking all these things, and then getting the products on your disc in four lines of Python, maybe three if you're clever. It's really slick, and we've gotten so much love for that one. I think it's an incredibly powerful tool that I've been really excited about. 

Andy Anderson (05:23):

Fantastic. Well, I thank you for talking to me today, and we will talk again sometime soon because we want to let users know what's happening next month, and I think users need to check in and follow us, and they will be kept up to date with what we're doing. 

Greg Short (05:39):

Fantastic. And again, always swing by Vertex and hit those help menus and look for our user guidance. We got some really good stuff there that's up to date and helpful on all your scientific processes. So 

Andy Anderson (05:53):

Fantastic. I'll get you there. Thanks for talking to 

Speaker 3 (05:57):

Me. All right, thank you. 

Andy Anderson (06:00):

Thank you for listening to this Alaska Satellite Facility podcast. We hope you enjoyed it and subscribe for more insights into using SAR data.