The company will launch a similar satellite later
Washington:
A small NASA satellite launched from New Zealand on Saturday with the mission of improving climate change prediction by measuring the heat escaping from Earth’s poles for the first time.
“This new information – and we’ve never had it before – will improve our ability to model what’s happening in the poles, what’s happening in the climate,” Karen St. Germain, NASA’s research director for earth sciences, recently told a press conference.
The satellite, which is the size of a shoebox, was launched by an Electron rocket, built by a company called Rocket Lab, which took off from Mahia in northern New Zealand. The overall mission is called PREFIRE.
The company will launch a similar satellite later.
They will serve to make infrared measurements far above the North Pole and Antarctica, in order to directly measure the heat that the poles release into space.
“This is critical because it actually helps to balance the excess heat received in the tropical regions and really regulate the Earth’s temperature,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, a mission researcher at the University of Wisconsin ,Madison.
“And the process of bringing heat from the tropical regions to the polar regions is actually what drives all of our weather on the planet,” he added.
With PREFIRE, NASA wants to understand how clouds, humidity or the melting of ice into water influence this heat loss from the poles.
Until now, the models climate change scientists used to measure heat loss were based on theories rather than real observations, L’Ecuyer said.
“Hopefully we will be able to improve our ability to simulate what sea level rise could look like in the future and also how polar climate change will affect weather systems across the planet,” he added.
Small satellites like these are an inexpensive way to answer very specific scientific questions, St. Germain said.
Larger satellites can be thought of as “generalists” and the smaller ones as “specialists,” she added.
“NASA needs both,” St. Germain said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
