Jan. 11 (UPI) — NASA is preparing to launch a three-year mission next month to study Earth’s atmosphere and oceans — from space — to gather data to help fight air pollution and climate change.
The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud and Ocean Ecosystem satellite, scheduled to launch as soon as Feb. 6, aims to answer many questions that could help improve the quality of life on Earth.
“PACE is going to teach us answers about the ocean that we haven’t been able to ask the questions for yet. It’s going to show us stuff that we don’t even know that we don’t know,” Gary Davis, PACE mission systems engineer, said in a recent NASA blog on the $805 million project.
Once in orbit 420 miles up, the satellite will scan Earth every other day to record data on aerosols and clouds that show they interact, their movement and their chemical composition. It should help fill gaps in computer models and replace estimations with real data to make computer models more accurate at determining expected changes in climate.
The new data is expected to better enable scientists to:Understand the carbon dioxide exchange between the atmosphere and the world’s oceansMeasure key variables that affect the atmosphere, air quality and climateMonitor the health of the world’s oceans through the study of phytoplankton, algae and tiny aquatic plants that sustain marine life
Aerosols affect the climate by absorbing sunlight and reflecting it into space, which affects the amount of the sun’s energy that reaches the Earth’s surface, Otto Hasekamp, senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, said in a NASA blog.
“Aerosols also affect cloud formation and properties, but the details of these relationships are not fully known to scientists,” Hasekamp said. “The data PACE collects will help to clarify some of these unknowns.”
In the oceans, the project aims to help identify different types of phytoplankton based on their unique spectral patterns, which could help scientists understand which algal blooms cause harm.
The PACE satellite’s ocean color instrument will measure the color of the ocean from shortwave infrared to ultraviolet. The OCI system is the most advanced NASA will have used and enables scientists to better determine how sunlight and particles in seawater, like chlorophyll, found in most species of phytoplankton, interact and affect the color.
The OCI instrument, built at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., consists of a rotating telescope, thermal radiators and solar and mirror calibration mechanisms. The OCI includes data, control and interface mechanisms, as well as a star tracker, radiators and an Earth shield.
Two other instruments — the hyper angular research polarimeter (HAARP2) and the spectro-polarimeter (SPEXone) — will provide researchers with greater accuracy than they could get from prior scientific instruments measuring light waves from sunlight passing through the ocean, clouds and aerosols.
“We will be making use of things that people cannot see — the nature of light — to understand things that we can’t otherwise observe,” Kirk Knobelspiesse, an atmospheric scientist and the PACE team’s lead polarimeter scientist, said in a NASA blog.
A consortium of researchers in the Netherlands and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County built the polarimeters.
“PACE will give us a view of the ocean and atmosphere that we have never had before. It opens up so many possibilities that we don’t even know about,” Ivona Centinic, biological oceanographer at the Ocean Ecology Lab at Goddard, said in a NASA blog.
“PACE is going to give us so much more insight than we expect about the ocean and atmosphere and interactions between them.”
The data will be sent back to Earth in real time, monitored by several observatories, led by Goddard.
The PACE satellite will be launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
