Pioneering the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the United States' civil space program and for research in aeronautics and space exploration. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., NASA operates ten field centers across the US. In the metadata context, NASA has developed and maintains standards for scientific data management, including the Directory Interchange Format (DIF) for describing Earth science datasets and contributions to geospatial metadata standards.