Tiny NASA Satellite Launched to Measure Earth’s Polar Heat Loss
NASA launched a shoebox-sized satellite on Saturday to improve climate change prediction by measuring heat escaping from Earth’s poles for the first time.
This mission, called PREFIRE, will provide crucial data on how heat loss from the poles affects Earth’s overall temperature and weather patterns.
“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 climate,” said Karen St. Germain, NASA’s earth sciences research director, at a recent news conference.
The shoe box-sized satellite was launched by an Electron rocket, built by Rocket Lab, which lifted off from Mahia in northern New Zealand. The overall mission is called PREFIRE.
Rocket Lab will later launch a similar satellite of its own. These satellites will take infrared measurements high above the Arctic and Antarctic to directly measure the heat the poles release into space.
“This is critical because it actually helps to balance the excess heat that’s received in the tropical regions and really regulate the Earth’s temperature,” explained Tristan L’Ecuyer, a mission researcher affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “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.”
With PREFIRE, NASA aims to understand how clouds, humidity, and the melting of ice into water affect this heat loss from the poles. Until now, climate change models gauging heat loss were based on theories rather than real observations, according to L’Ecuyer.
“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 added.
Small satellites like this one are a low-cost way to answer very specific scientific questions, said St. Germain. Larger satellites can be thought of as “generalists” and the small ones as “specialists,” she added. “NASA needs both,” said St. Germain.
