Picture Perfect Launch For Eye In Sky
A rocket blasted off from a foggy oceanside launch pad Saturday, ferrying to orbit a NASA satellite on a $952 million mission to track the movement of water as it cycles through the world's land, oceans and atmosphere.
The Aqua satellite, riding aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket, streaked into space after the 2:55 a.m. launch.
The 6,468-pound, Earth-observing spacecraft separated from the rocket at 3:54 a.m. at an altitude of 425 miles. An hour later, Aqua deployed its solar panel and began generating the electricity needed to power its six scientific instruments, including two contributed by Japan and Brazil.
"We have got a spacecraft with energy, we're right where we are supposed to be and we're not wobbly. It was a picture-perfect launch," said National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman David Steitz.
Aqua should start its six-year science mission in August, sending each day enough data to fill the hard drives of 75 personal computers. Scientists hope to use that data to improve weather forecasts and track changes in the global climate.
To do so, the TRW-built satellite will monitor the global movement of water, whether as solid, liquid or gas.
Clocking how quickly and in what quantities that water moves can help gauge any changes in the global climate. As the world warms, scientists believe, the increased amount of energy speeds up the hydrologic cycle, meaning more evaporation and precipitation.
"The Earth's climate is a very interconnected system," said Claire Parkinson, Aqua's project scientist. "Aqua, by measuring as many variables as it is going to be measuring, is going to help us to understand more fully some of those interconnections."
Aqua is also designed to make precise measurements of both atmospheric temperature and humidity to aid in weather forecasting.
Currently, forecasters send about 4,000 sensor-equipped balloons aloft every day to collect that data. Aqua, by comparison, will make 400,000 equivalent measurements across the globe each day, said Moustafa Chahine, an Aqua scientist.
A half-dozen weather forecasting agencies around the world hope to use that data, said Ghassem Asrar, NASA's associate administrator for Earth science. Asrar said the goal is to expand the current three- to five-day weather forecasting limit to as many as seven or 10.
Stephen Lord, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Environmental Modeling Center in Camp Springs, said Aqua should improve short-term forecasts.
"It's not going to be a brave new world, but in these things if you get even 1 percent improvement, you're doing well," Lord said.
Aqua is the second of the three major satellite observatories in NASA's Earth Observing System program. Terra, the first, was launched in 1999. Aura is scheduled for launch in 2004.
The program's goal is to provide "the first-ever, comprehensive set of observations from space to examine practically every aspect of the Earth from space and help us gain this holistic and total-system understanding of Earth," Asrar said.