by NASA’s newest Earth-watching satellite has taken it off the chopping block all the way into orbit.
The nearly $1 billion PACE mission, which the Trump administration tried to cancel four separate times, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket early this morning (Feb. 8) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Once up and running, PACE will make key observations of the Earth’s atmosphere and climate and allow scientists to assess the health of our oceans like never before.
“What I’m most excited about is that PACE will advance our understanding of how our oceans work and how they relate to the wider Earth system,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, during a pre-launch briefing on Sunday (February 4).
“PACE is going to show us the biology of the oceans on a scale we’ve never been able to see before,” she said.
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Smooth, fast shipping
The Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 today at 1:33 am EST (0633 GMT), after several days of delays due to bad weather.
About 7.5 minutes after launch, the first stage of the rocket came back for a vertical touchdown at Landing Zone 1, SpaceX’s facility at Cape Town. It was the fourth launch and landing for this particular booster, according to SpaceX’s mission description.
Five minutes later, the upper stage of the Falcon 9 PACE (short for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem) entered a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) about 420 miles (677 kilometers) above Earth – about 70% higher. than the flies of the International Space Station.
In SSOs, which pass over the Earth’s poles, satellites see every patch of land at the same solar time every day. The lighting conditions are therefore consistent, allowing spacecraft to monitor or detect changes in the Earth’s surface more easily. For this reason, SSOs are popular destinations for weather and spy satellites.
PACE, by the way, is the first US government mission to launch into a white orbit from Florida since November 30, 1960. On that day, the Thor Able Star rocket attempted such a trajectory but failed, at rain down on Cuban trash. , some of whom apparently killed a cow. Rather than risk further incidents, the US subsequently decided to conduct all of its polar launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base (now Vandenberg Space Force Base) in California — until now.
That said, PACE wasn’t the first mission of any kind launched into white orbit from Florida’s Space Coast in six decades: SpaceX had completed 11 such commercial missions before sending PACE on its way.
The color of the sea
PACE operators will now work to accelerate the 10.5-foot-long (3.2-meter) spacecraft and its various subsystems. After this check period, the satellite can start its science work.
That work will be done through an instrument. One of them, a spectrometer called the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), will map the ocean panorama in unprecedented detail and range, from near-infrared to ultraviolet wavelengths.
These colors are determined by the interaction of sunlight with particles in seawater, such as chlorophyll produced by photosynthetic plankton, the base of the marine food web. So OCI will reveal a lot about the health and status of ocean ecosystems, according to PACE team members.
“PACE’s unprecedented spectral coverage will provide the first-ever global measurements designed to identify phytoplankton community composition,” NASA officials wrote in the PACE mission description. “This will greatly improve our ability to understand the Earth’s changing marine ecosystems, manage natural resources such as fisheries and identify harmful algal blooms.”
The other two instruments on the satellite are polarimeters. They will measure how passage through the ocean, clouds and aerosols (particles suspended in the atmosphere) on the oscillations of light in a plane, known as its polarization.
“The polarization states of UV-to-shortwave light at different angles provide detailed information on the atmosphere and ocean, such as particle size and composition,” NASA officials wrote in the mission description.
So PACE’s contributions to Earth and climate science will be many and varied, agency officials stress.
“PACE is going to provide more information on the oceans and atmosphere, including providing new ways to study how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon,” said Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate adviser, during Sunday’s briefing.
“In addition to the information PACE will provide that helps us understand long-term climate, PACE will also give us information about the oceans and air quality that can help people today,” she said.
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Tough road to the launch pad
PACE drove through quite a bit of adversity on its way to the launch pad. For example, President Donald Trump’s administration tried to cancel the mission four separate times, in its budget proposals for fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. But Congress appropriated the necessary funds each time, saving PACE from the block. chopping. .
The mission also dealt with delays and cost overruns. In 2014, NASA capped the total price of the mission at $805 million, with the launch targeted for 2022. However, the cost has increased to $948 million.
But the wait and the money are well worth it, according to St. Germain, who compared PACE favorably to NASA’s flagship James Webb Space Telescope.
“It will teach us about the oceans in the same way that Webb is teaching us about the cosmos,” she said.
