NASA is preparing to send two small twin spacecraft around the world to collect data to help combat climate change.
Shoebox-sized satellites in the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE), or “Cube satellites,” will blast off in Spring 2024. It will reach an altitude of between 292 and 403 miles (470 and 650 kilometers). On Earth, the two spacecraft will sit in orbits near the poles and cross each other in the atmosphere.
For the first time, PREFIRE will measure the full spectrum of heat lost from Earth’s polar regions. These cold regions of our planet effectively act as Earth’s thermostat, regulating the climate by expelling excess energy from the tropics. In summary, PREFIRE will make our climate models more accurate; This is a crucial goal as our planet continues to warm inorganically due to human activities.
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“We have the potential to discover some fundamental things about how our planet works,” Brian Drouin, deputy principal investigator of the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. said. “Much of the uncertainty in climate projections comes from what we don’t know about the North and South poles and how efficiently radiation spreads into space. The importance of this radiation went unrecognized for much of the Space Age, but now we know and aim to measure it.”
Earth’s average global temperature is increasing; This is a direct result of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere due to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.
While global warming poses risks to people and wildlife everywhere on the planet, there is no place on Earth that is feeling the impact of climate change more than the Arctic. This polar region, located in the northernmost part of the world, has warmed three times faster than anywhere else in the world since the 1970s. As a result, winter sea ice in the Arctic has decreased by more than 15,900 square miles (41,200 square kilometers) per year, representing a loss of 2.6% per decade.
On the other side of the world, in Antarctica, things are similarly bleak. Ice sheets in this south polar region are losing mass at an average rate of 150 billion tons per year.
Changes in these polar regions have worldwide consequences and affect the temperature as well as the circulation of the ocean.
Water from melted ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland has accounted for about a third of sea level rise since 1993. Rising sea levels have both direct and indirect impacts on people, especially those living in coastal communities. Coastal waters increase the risk of injury and even death; It can also cause contamination of nearby water bodies and landforms with untreated wastewater.
In some areas, coastal waters also foster habitat for mosquitoes, increasing the risk of exposure to serious insect-borne diseases such as West Nile virus. Additionally, land loss can damage transportation infrastructure, impact access to healthcare and utilities, and put sectors such as agriculture and tourism at risk.
“If you change the polar regions, you also fundamentally change the weather around the world,” said PREFIRE principal investigator and University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist Tristan L’Ecuyer. “Extreme storms, flooding, coastal erosion—all of these are affected by what’s happening in the Arctic and Antarctica.”
Therefore, to understand and predict these changes and limit their impacts, scientists need to incorporate numerous physical processes into high-fidelity climate models. But projections are currently affected by a lack of data on how efficiently the poles radiate heat into space. This is where NASA’s twin spacecraft concept comes into play.
The PREFIRE spacecraft can maximize coverage of the polar regions by following different paths around the world, overlapping at the poles every few hours. Using technology similar to that used by the Mars Climate Sounder on NASA’s Mars Orbiter, the twin spacecraft will also be able to monitor far-infrared wavelengths that have not been systematically measured before.
These wavelengths are responsible for 60% of the energy flowing into space from our planet’s polar regions.
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 major gap in climate models and providing scientists with a more accurate picture of climate change.
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The two PREFIRE spacecraft will launch from New Zealand in May, with the satellites launching separately and two weeks apart.
“As our climate models converge, we will begin to truly understand what the future will look like in the Arctic and Antarctic,” L’Ecuyer concluded.