by NASA is preparing to send two twin spacecraft to the ends of the Earth to collect data that will help in the fight against climate change.
The shoebox satellites, or “Cubesats,” will blast off in the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE) during Spring 2024. They will reach an altitude of between 292 and 403 miles (470 and 650 kilometers) above Earth, the of their spacecraft in near polar orbits, crossing each other in the atmosphere.
For the first time, PREFIRE will measure the entire spectrum of heat loss from Earth’s polar regions. These frigid areas of our planet effectively act as the Earth’s thermostat, regulating the climate by releasing excess energy found in the tropics. In short, PREFIRE will make our climate models more accurate—a very important goal as our planet continues to warm inorganically due to human activities.
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“We have the potential to find out some fundamental things about how our planet works,” Brian Drouin, deputy principal investigator for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. “In climate projections, a lot of the uncertainty comes from what we don’t know about the North and South poles and how effectively radiation is emitted into space. But we know now and the aim is let’s measure it.”
The Earth’s global average temperature is rising, a direct result of the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by human activity, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels.
And while global warming threatens people and wildlife around the world, nowhere in the world is feeling the impact of climate change more than the Arctic. Since the 1970s, this polar region, located in the northernmost part of the Earth, has warmed 3 times faster than anywhere else on earth. As a result, winter sea ice in the Arctic is decreasing by over 15,900 square miles (41,200 square kilometers) per year, representing a loss of 2.6% per decade.
Things are similarly grim at the other end of the Earth, Antarctica. In this south polar region, ice sheets are losing mass at an average rate of about 150 billion tons per year.
The changes in these polar regions have consequences across the globe, affecting the temperature and circulation of the ocean.
Water from melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland accounts for about a third of sea level rise since 1993. Rising sea levels have direct and indirect impacts on people, especially people in coastal communities. Coastal flooding increases the risk of injury, and even mortality; it can also pollute nearby bodies of water with untreated wastewater.
In some regions, coastal flooding creates the perfect habitat for mosquitoes, increasing the risk of exposure to serious insect-borne diseases such as West Nile virus. In addition, land loss can damage transport infrastructure, affecting access to health care and public services and endangering industries such as agriculture and tourism.
“If you change the polar regions, you fundamentally change the weather around the world as well,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, PREFIRE principal investigator and University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist. “Extreme storms, floods, coastal erosion – all these things affect what’s going on in the Arctic and Antarctic.”
Therefore, to understand these changes, predict them and limit their effect, scientists need to include a wealth of physical processes in highly accurate climate models. However, current projections are affected by a lack of data on how effectively the poles radiate heat into space. This is where NASA’s twin spacecraft concept comes in.
By following different paths around the globe, overlapping the poles every few hours, the PREFIRE spacecraft can maximize coverage of the polar regions. Using technology similar to that used by the Mars Climate Sounder on NASA’s Mars Exploration Orbiter, the two spacecraft will be able to monitor far-infrared wavelengths that have never been systematically measured before.
These wavelengths are responsible for 60% of the energy that flows into space from the polar regions of our planet.
This means PREFIRE should be able to provide new data on a range of climate variables including atmospheric temperature, surface properties, water vapor and clouds, filling a huge gap in climate models and giving scientists a more accurate picture on climate change.
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The two PREFIRE spacecraft are due to launch from New Zealand in May, with the satellites taking off two weeks apart.
“As our climate models converge, we will begin to really understand what the future holds in the Arctic and Antarctic,” said L’Ecuyer.
