 Hey, this is Dr. Thomas See with Science and Seconds, and I'm here with Karen St. Germain, or as we refer to her with three Karen's in our team as Karen Earth. Karen, so good to chat with you. It's great to be here with you, Thomas. This is an amazing week for Earth Science with the announcement of the Earth System Observatory. Tell me why you are excited about this announcement. Well, I couldn't be more excited because the Earth System Observatory is really our future in NASA Earth Science. It's a collection of missions that will view the Earth in three dimensions and allow us to answer questions we've never been able to answer before about how the Earth System works. You have open source science as a key paradigm for this. Can you explain to us what that means for the science community and the user community? Yeah, so in the past, our missions have had the science and the data systems attached directly to the mission. As we move forward with this integrated observatory, it will be a collection of missions, but we'll handle the data and the science all in one open ecosystem. So people, even people who aren't funded to do NASA research can get to the data and develop their own science and applications from it. One of the things I'm really excited about is just that partnership we've already had with in our sister agencies to really enable them to use our data right away, but also, as you said, for-profit and non-for-profits really focus on vulnerable communities that are very much affected by climate change. The application domain is handled really different in these missions as well. Can you talk to us about that? Yeah, in the past, we've built our missions around the science questions, and then when we found that there was something that might be a useful application, we then invested in that, often with partners. In the case of the Earth System Observatory, we're building that in right up front as we design the missions. We're designing them not only to answer the science questions, but also to support applications or use of the data, and through the open science, we really want to accelerate that and make sure that happens really quickly. I just love that the Earth System Observatory, really observing the Earth as from multiple, for many platforms in 3D and enabling that through open source science and direct linkage to applications, these data need to be put in the hands of the users urgently. There's, of course, other announcements that are coming out which are related to explorers. Do you want to quickly talk to us about why you believe innovation is such a critical part? Yeah, the core observatory is what we have been talking about, but there's another layer to the Earth System Observatory which will be defined through competition. The National Academy gave us a list of things that they think it's important for NASA to observe, but they said, hey, we think you should use competition to inject innovation and really get more people involved in the NASA Observatory. So the Earth Explorers will be this competitive layer to the Earth System Observatory that will really fill out our view of the 3D Earth. Karen St. Germain, our Division Director of Earth Sciences, couldn't be more proud of you and your team and I look forward to seeing you implement those amazing plans against all of them are, of course, recommended by the National Academies and have the kind of passion of a team behind it, both within NASA, beyond NASA and also internationally. Thanks so much, Karen. Thanks, Thomas.