Forte and San Team Rocketblasting Off Again
NASA recently launched an water ice-measuring satellite that scientists say will define the next decade of Antarctic enquiry. The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2, or ICESat-2, is the most advanced laser musical instrument of its kind and will measure changes in the heights of Earth's polar regions, helping scientists calculate future impacts on global sea level and climate.
The satellite was successfully launched into space on Sept. fifteen at 6:02 a.m. from Vandenberg Air Forcefulness Base of operations in California via United Launch Alliance'due south last Delta II rocket. (View the launch here.)
A team of scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego attended the pre-dawn launch, gathering with a oversupply of onlookers at a viewing site overlooking the launch pad. Several Scripps Oceanography scientists have contributed to the ICESat-2 mission, notably glaciologist Helen Fricker who has served as a member of NASA's Science Definition Team for more than than a decade. She described the experience of seeing the launch every bit "incredibly heady and actually rather overwhelming."
"The launch was excellent to see, and the fact it was dark made it fifty-fifty more than striking. The wink and then the audio of the rocket blasting off, and then seeing it being propelled upward through the marine layer and so out once again for a 2nd glimpse, was thrilling," said Fricker, a professor at the Found of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps.
Fricker's inquiry focuses on water ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland and their role in the climate organisation. As these areas are vast and extremely difficult to monitor at basis level, she and other scientists rely on satellite radar and laser altimetry and other remote-sensing data to understand ice canvass processes.
Data nerveless by ICESat-2 will be instrumental to her research. The Smart car-sized satellite will measure the average annual elevation change of polar ice downwards to the width of a pencil, providing a precise and unprecedented view of Earth's icy surfaces.
Fricker was joined at the launch past her current graduate educatee Susheel Adusumilli, onetime PhD students Matt Siegfried and Fernando Paulo (both Scripps alumni), and Scripps geophysicist Adrian Borsa. [View photo gallery.]
"Information technology was amazing to be able to see the launch, especially knowing that information technology was a mission that could define the side by side decade of my field," said Adusumilli, a fourth-year PhD educatee whose research is focused on monitoring Antarctica'due south water ice sheets. "Information technology was crazy to retrieve that all the previous work done past NASA and other groups toward ICESat-2, and the future trajectories of so many scientists, was in the residual for a two-hr catamenia."
ICESat-two is a follow-on projection to the original ICESat mission, which launched in January 2003 and operated for seven years before existence retired and decommissioned in 2010. The original satellite was the benchmark mission for measuring the summit of ice sheets, but it too experienced some technical difficulties that limited its operations. NASA'southward Operation IceBridge, the largest airborne survey of Earth'due south polar ice, helped scientists close the gap betwixt the two ICESat missions.
The new ICESat-2 spacecraft has been redesigned and represents the latest in cutting-border technology to written report Earth's frozen regions, known equally the cryosphere. The satellite has an Avant-garde Topographic Laser Altimeter Organisation (ATLAS) which will send 10,000 laser pulses a second to Earth'southward surface and measure the height of ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice, and vegetation by calculating the time it takes the pulses to return to the spacecraft.
ICESat-2 is currently orbiting the Earth from an average altitude of 290 miles. The door to the ATLAS instrument was successfully opened on Sept. 29, and on the following day the laser was turned on and began firing its kickoff photons. The first returns from Antarctica came in overnight on Oct. iii.
Borsa, an assistant professor at Scripps, will exist involved with the calibration and validation of the ICESat-2 laser system. He is currently serving as a liaison betwixt the ICESat-2 science team and NASA'southward Goddard Space Flight Heart. The job of calibrating and validating the instrument's measurements is a critical component to the overall success of the mission.
The entire scientific discipline team now awaits the trove of information that is bound to begin pouring in.
"We just got the showtime photons from the footing, so we know that the instrument is working equally designed," said Fricker, noting there is yet much work to be done as a member of the science team. "In nigh 2 weeks' time it volition exist all hands on deck to await at the data."
Fricker originally came to Scripps from Tasmania in 1999 to work as a postdoctoral scholar with geophysicist Jean-Bernard Minster, a fellow member of the original ICESat science team who helped contribute to the mission's scientific goals. She said that Minster involved her in many of the ICESat Science Team meetings that he attended at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Now that she serves every bit an ICESat-2 team member in a similar role, Fricker realizes she has come up full circumvolve.
"At the team meeting the solar day before launch, it struck me how meaning these 2 missions and the people involved in them have been to my career, and equally a consequence to my life and family here in the United States," she said.
Echoing the sentiments of many in the scientific discipline community, Fricker and Adusumilli said they are hopeful that the ICESat-2 data will lead to new discoveries near ice sheets and bounding main ice.
"I was at a scientific briefing on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—the part of Antarctica that is changing rapidly—just two days after launch, said Adusumilli, "and about every time someone mentioned an unanswered question, we knew that ICESat-two could play a crucial role in answering it."
Related Prototype Gallery: ICESat-2 Launch
Source: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/around-pier-nasa-launches-worlds-most-advanced-ice-measuring-satellite-orbit
Publicar un comentario for "Forte and San Team Rocketblasting Off Again"