NASA is preparing to launch its latest climate science mission, the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE), which aims to collect entirely new data on how heat is lost to space from Earth’s polar regions.
PREFIRE consists of a pair of cubesats that will be separately launched into near-polar orbits. The first, “Ready, Aim, PREFIRE,” is scheduled to launch no earlier than (NET) May 22 on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Pad B at the company’s Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand. The second Cubesat, “PREFIRE and ICE”, will be launched in a few days.
The pair is designed to measure far-infrared radiation – wavelengths longer than 15 microns – which account for about 60 percent of total heat loss at the poles. “We’ve never measured this before,” PREFIRE principal investigator Tristan L’Equière of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said during a May 15 call with reporters. L’Ecuyer says PREFIRE will help scientists study how different properties at the poles, such as clouds, humidity and surface oscillations between frozen and liquid states, contribute to the dissipation of heat lost to space.
On the topic: NASA selects Rocket Lab to conduct consistent climate change research
The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, leading to a paradigm shift for local populations and polar wildlife habitats, as well as global consequences such as rising sea levels. “In the end, [PREFIRE] The information will be combined with our climate models, and hopefully we will be able to improve our ability to model what sea level rise might look like in the future, as well as how polar climate change will affect weather systems around the planet,” said L’ Ecuer.
Each of the PREFIRE cubic sats is about the size of a loaf of bread and contains identical thermal infrared spectrometers. Despite their small size, their cost-effective design and purpose fit perfectly into NASA’s growing array of climate research missions, such as the much larger SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite to study water levels around the planet. “NASA needs both our big missions and these smaller missions,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Sciences Division at the agency’s headquarters. “You can think of them in a sense as generalists versus specialists to answer the whole range of questions we have about understanding the Earth as a system.”
Each Cubesat is equipped with one infrared spectrometer. Mary White, PREFIRE project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described them as a “scaled-down” version of NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) optical system during a May 15 call and noted similarities with two additional missions that have successfully passed the test. technology — the Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
The dual-satellite approach of the mission allows researchers to get a unique view of the changes taking place at the poles of our planet. “Having a single cubesat would be able to formulate what the radiation looks like in the polar regions,” explained L’Equier. “We’re going to use two cubesats to make measurements over several hours, taking the difference between those measurements and trying to understand how the processes that are happening in the Arctic actually affect emissions from the Arctic.”
As with all NASA climate research, White says the PREFIRE data will be available to the public: “All NASA data is open and freely available to any scientist or any interested person anywhere in the world. This is part of our open scientific data policy, and it will certainly be true for this mission.”