by SpaceX launched an environmental research satellite for NASA early Thursday, a nearly $1 billion spacecraft that has survived multiple threats of cancellation and is now poised to shed new light on climate change and the complex interplay of heat-trapping carbon, aerosols and life. sea on a global scale.
The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission — PACE — “will greatly advance our understanding of the relationship between aerosols and clouds, and the global energy balance,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth sciences division. “This is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in our ability to model the climate.”
She said that PACE “is teaching us about the oceans in the same way that Webb (the James Webb Space Telescope) is teaching us about the cosmos.” And that includes “a huge amount about ocean biology.”
“This will really focus on understanding phytoplankton, these very small organisms that live in the ocean, which are the basis of life in our oceans in general.”
The oceans cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface, she said, “and yet the oceans are one of the least understood parts of the Earth system. PACE is going to advance our understanding of how the oceans work and how which greatly promotes life in the oceans. related to life on land.”
Running two days late due to high winds at the launch site, the mission began at 1:33 a.m. EST Thursday when the nine first-stage engines powering the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life, lighting up the sky. deep overnight over Cape Canaveral.
Putting on a spectacular show, the Falcon 9 took off on a southern path over the Atlantic Ocean just off the east coast of Florida as it climbed toward a 420 mile high orbit around the Earth’s poles.
Polar orbits allow Earth observation satellites, weather stations and exploration platforms to see the entire planet as it orbits below. Tuesday’s launch was the first polar launch from the East Coast for the US government since 1960 when a rocket malfunctioned and debris fell on Cold War-era Cuba and killed a cow.
Since then, NASA and the Pentagon have launched polar uploads from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
But SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 into polar orbit from Florida in August 2020 and has since sent multiple payloads on such southern trajectories. With PACE, NASA agreed that the government’s safety requirements had been met.
Trajectories and launch sites aside, the PACE mission had a rocky road to the launch pad. The Trump administration has made multiple attempts to cancel the project, in part to devote more resources to NASA’s accelerated moon program. But Congress did not follow through, and funding was returned to the agency’s budget each time.
“I’m not going to dive into policy or politics, but it’s a great journey,” said Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist. He credited the scientific community, NASA and the public for keeping the program on track and boosting morale throughout.
The PACE satellite, built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is equipped with three instruments: a hyperspectral color camera and two light-analyzing polarimeters, one providing wide-angle views of polarized light reflected from the ground , from the sea and from the sea and from the sea. the atmosphere below and the other providing a narrow-angle view.
“It’s a three-instrument payload and really, the technology really works just like your eyes do,” Werdell said. “We’re looking for interactions of sunlight — photons, quanta — with the atmosphere, ocean and land. Whatever those photons hit, they’re absorbed or scattered, and then the instrument sees what’s in them.”
Despite its name, PACE is not an ocean mission. It is not an atmosphere mission. It is not a ground mission. It’s an all-of-all mission,” Werdell said.
“And that’s really important, because you can’t understand one without understanding the other. … This is a mission where we don’t know what we’re going to learn. And that’s very exciting. .”
PACE is expected to provide high-precision data that will allow researchers to fine-tune computer models, giving policymakers more accurate information about ongoing trends and long-term threats. It will also provide real-time measurements of aerosol movement through the atmosphere, plankton health and carbon transport.
“Understanding how ocean life interacts with the atmosphere and global climate is one of the secrets of the universe here at home,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free.
“Aerosols that pass through the ocean and atmosphere are factors in how clouds form and how weather systems behave. But exactly how that process works is a scientific mystery. One major goal of PACE’s mission to solve it.”
Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate adviser, said the past 10 years have been the warmest since record-keeping began, reflecting an overall warming trend driven largely by greenhouse gases such as bi- carbon monoxide.
“As carbon dioxide is released, the land absorbs some of it, the ocean absorbs some of it, and some of it stays in the atmosphere trapping heat,” she said. “Greenhouse gases are not the only factors that affect temperature, there are these tiny particles called aerosols that reflect or absorb sunlight and also affect cloud formation.
“PACE is going to provide more information on the oceans and the atmosphere, including providing new ways to study how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon. It will also give us information on aerosols, information that helps us understand long-term climate.”
The PACE satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket and its mission operations cost NASA $948 million. After extensive tests and instrument calibration, science observations are expected to begin in about two months.
Although the mission design life calls for a three-year mission, project officials are optimistic that the spacecraft will operate for 10 years or more when all is said and done.
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