July 2024

Dear SESAR User, 

SESAR is celebrating its 20th year in operation. Since SESAR’s inception in 2004, our users (you!) have registered >5 million samples! Our users are based in more than 64 countries and represent collections from international sample repositories, museum collections, and hundreds of individual researchers. SESAR’s success is only possible through your engagement with our community and services – thank you for supporting us! 

The SESAR team has been hard at work to envision and start implementing the next 20 years of SESAR. Based on input from our users, we have several changes planned that will improve SESAR’s future usability and sustainability. Notably: 

  • You may have noticed that SESAR is now SESAR2: the System for Earth and Extraterrestrial Sample Registration. This name change is in recognition of our on-going work to establish sample registration services for astromaterials in collaboration with the Astromaterials Data System.
  • We are in the process of updating and refreshing SESAR2’s user interfaces, including the SESAR2 Catalog Search and the sample registration tools in MySESAR. You will see new releases and requests for testing over the next 12 months.
  • We are updating SESAR2’s backend, including phasing out GeoPass login (replacing it with ORCID login), and migrating and updating the database to better support user needs and communities.
  • We are taking steps toward becoming a DataCite Service Provider. This will make it easier for organizations that are already DataCite members to register their samples with SESAR2. We are also considering becoming a DataCite Consortium Lead which will substantially reduce the fees for organizations to become a DataCite member as required to register large numbers of samples (>10,000/year). If you are interested in using SESAR2 to register samples for your whole organization, fill out this short form here so we can get in touch.

We will continue to update you as we make these changes, through newsletters, webinars and other community events. There will be multiple opportunities to give us feedback and even participate in user testing, so please keep an eye out for further updates.

Thank you!
The SESAR2 Team

Kerstin Lehnert, Project Director
Andrea Thomer, Product Manager
Sean Cao, System Engineer
Saebyul Choe, Data Curator
Juan David Figueroa, Application Developer
Natalie Raia, UX and Community Researcher
Stephen Richards, Technical Consultant
Dave Vieglais, Technical Consultant