Published: Saturday, May 18, 2020
Artist’s conception of the PREFIRE Cubesats “Ready Aim PREFIRE”, “PREFIRE and Ice” and “Ready Aim PREFIRE in near-polar orbit around Earth.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA is getting ready to launch the Polar Radiant Energy Far-Infrared Experiment, which will capture new data about how heat escapes from Earth’s poles to space.
The PREFIRE system consists of two cubesats, which will be launched separately into orbits near the poles. “Ready, Aim, PreFIRE” is scheduled to launch on a Rocket Lab Electron from Pad B of the company’s Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand, no earlier than (NET), May 22. The second cubesat “PREFIRE & ICE” will launch a couple of days later.
The pair is designed to measure the far-infrared rays (wavelengths longer than 15 nanometers) that are responsible for 60 percent of all heat loss at the poles. Tristan L’Ecuyer, PREFIRE Principal Investigator at the University of Wisconsin Madison said during a call with journalists on May 15, “We’ve not measured that before.” L’Ecuyer said PREFIRE would help scientists understand how different properties, like clouds, humidity, and fluctuations of the surface from frozen to liquid states, can affect the amount of heat that is lost into space.
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Arctic warming is faster than any other place on Earth. This has global implications, such as sea level rise, and can have a profound impact on local populations, wildlife habitats, and the environment. “Ultimately, [PREFIRE] L’Ecuyer explained that information will be added to our climate models to help improve our ability of predicting what the sea level rise in the future might look like, as well as how polar climate changes are going to impact the weather systems on the planet.
Each PREFIRE cubesat is about the same size as a loaf, and contains identical thermal infrared spectrumometers. The small cubesats, with their unique purpose and cost-effective design, fit well into NASA’s growing matrix for climate research missions. For example, the larger SWOT satellite, which studies water levels on the planet, is a great addition to the NASA climate research mission matrix. Karen St. Germain is the director of NASA’s Earth Science Division at its headquarters. She said that NASA needs both large missions and smaller missions. You can think of these missions as specialists versus generalists to answer the full range of questions that we have regarding Earth as a whole.
Each cubesat has a single infrared spectrum. Mary White, PREFIRE project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory described them as “scaled down” versions of NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper optical system (M3) during the call on May 15. She also pointed out similarities with two other missions that successfully validated the tech — the Mars Climate Sounder instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment mounted to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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The cubesats are in near-polar orbits about the Earth. The dual-satellite mission allows researchers to get a unique perspective of changes occurring at the poles of our planet. (Image credit: University of Wisconsin Madison) L’Ecuyer said that one cubesat could be used to map the emissions in the polar region. We’ll use the two cubesats over several hours to take measurements, and then compare the results to try to understand the effects of the Arctic processes on the emissions.
White also says that PREFIRE data, like all NASA’s climate research data, will be available to the public. “All NASA data is open and free for all interested scientists around the globe. This is part of NASA’s open science data policy and would be true in this case.
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Josh Dinner is Space.com’s Content Manager. Josh Dinner is a writer, photographer and enthusiast of science and space exploration. He has covered the space beat for Space.com since 2016. Josh has covered NASA’s commercial partnerships from the early Dragon and Cygnus missions, to the ongoing development of crewed space missions launched from the Space Coast as well as NASA scientific missions. He enjoys making 1:144 models of spacecraft and rockets. You can see some of Josh’s photography from launch events on his website and Instagram. He also posts a lot on Twitter in haiku.
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Source: Space.com