The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has launched a small satellite from New Zealand today intending to enhance climate change forecast by detecting heat escaping from the 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,” NASA’s earth sciences research director Karen St. Germain said at a recent press briefing.
The shoebox-sized satellite was launched by an Electron rocket constructed by Rocket Lab, which took off from Mahia in northern New Zealand. PREFIRE refers to the overall mission. The business will later launch a similar satellite.
They will be used to collect infrared data far above the Arctic and Antarctic regions to directly monitor the heat that the poles emit into space.
“This is critical because it helps to balance the excess heat that’s received in the tropical regions and regulates the earth’s temperature,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, a mission researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“And the process of getting the heat from the tropical regions to the polar regions is actually what drives all of our weather around the planet,” he stated.
NASA’s PREFIRE mission attempts to better understand how clouds, humidity, and ice melting into water affect heat loss from the poles. According to L’Ecuyer, climate change scientists’ models for calculating heat loss were previously based on hypotheses rather than facts.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to improve our ability to simulate what sea level rise might look like in the future and also how the polar climate change is going to affect the weather systems around the planet,” he said.
According to St. Germain, small satellites like this one provide a low-cost way to answer highly precise scientific inquiries. Larger satellites might be thought of as “generalists,” while smaller ones are “specialists,” she explained. “Nasa needs both,” stated St. Germain.