Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A NASA spacecraft designed to provide high-resolution soil moisture measurements and help scientists better predict extreme weather events successfully launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this morning.
The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) will also report on the state of that moisture (i.e. if it is frozen or thawed) once it the Earth’s orbit, according to the US space agency. SMAP will map the entire globe every two to three days for a period of at least three years, they added.
The vehicle will provide what NASA is calling the most accurate and highest-resolution maps of soil moisture ever obtained, and that information is also expected to help monitor climate change and improve our understanding of our planet’s water, energy and carbon cycles.
SMAP will enter a final circular polar orbit of 426 miles (685 kilometers) at an inclination of 98.1 degrees. The probe will orbit the Earth once every 98.5 minutes, repeating the same ground track every eight days, and the information it provides will help scientists monitor droughts, keep tabs on crop productivity and even improve the quality of weather forecasts.
The mission blasted off from Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex 2 at 9:22am EST, and was carried into space by a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. The successful launch comes on the heels of delays that forced Thursday’s originally-scheduled launch to be scrubbed due to high winds and Friday’s rescheduled event to be pushed back for repairs to the launch vehicle.
SMAP will combine measurements from both a radar and a radiometer in order to compile data that has high resolution and high accuracy. Those two instruments will work together to look into the top two inches (five centimeters) of the soil through clouds and moderate vegetation, and will be able to operate at any time during the day or night, according to NASA.
The term “active passive,” which is part of the mission name, is a reference to the two types of instruments that will be used by SMAP. One of those instruments is a synthetic aperture radar that will actively emit a signal and measure the backscatter that returns from Earth. The other is a radiometer instrument that passively records Earth’s naturally emitted microwave signal.
Information about changes in soil moisture will be communicated through variations in the signals of the two instruments. SMAP’s radar observations will have higher resolution but lower accuracy than the radiometer, and conversely, the radiometer will provide observations that are more accurate by in lower resolution than is possible using the radar equipment.
“Soil moisture is an important part of the Earth’s climate,” Chuong Nguyen, SMAP mission manager at the Kennedy Space Center Launch Services Program (LSP), said on Wednesday. “As it evaporates, it condenses into the clouds and atmosphere, and that in turn becomes rain later in the weather cycle. SMAP will help with climate forecasting and help predict a good growing season. That’s an important part of agriculture, in the U.S. and around the world.”
Saturday’s payload also includes the ELaNa X CubeSats, a total of four probes representing three separate missions: ExoCube, which will measure the densities of ions and neutrals in the upper ionosphere and lower exosphere; GRIFEX, which will help the proposed GEO-CAPE mission monitor atmospheric chemistry and pollution levels; and FIREBIRD-II (A and B), space weather satellites that will study electron microbursts in the Van Allen radiation belts.
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