Tag: PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem)

NASA’s ORCA, AirHARP Projects Paved Way for PACE to Reach Space

NeRD

It took the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission just 13 minutes to reach low-Earth orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in February 2024. It took a network of scientists at NASA and research institutions around the world more than 20 years to carefully craft and test the novel instruments that allow PACE to study the ocean and atmosphere with unprecedented clarity. In the early 2000s, a team of scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, prototyped the Ocean Radiometer for Carbon Assessment (ORCA) instrument,…

Read More

NASA’s PACE Data on Ocean, Atmosphere, Climate Now Available

NeRD

4 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA’s PACE satellite’s Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) detects light across a hyperspectral range, which gives scientists new information to differentiate communities of phytoplankton – a unique ability of NASA’s newest Earth-observing satellite. This first image released from OCI identifies two different communities of these microscopic marine organisms in the ocean off the coast of South Africa on Feb. 28, 2024. The central panel of this image shows Synechococcus in pink and picoeukaryotes in green. The left panel of this…

Read More

NASA Invites Public to Share in Excitement of PACE Mission Launch

NeRD

NASA and SpaceX technicians safely encapsulate NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) spacecraft in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 payload fairings on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024, at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo Credit: NASA Goddard/Denny Henry NASA is hosting virtual activities ahead of the launch of the PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission and invites you to share in the fun. The PACE mission will help us better understand how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon dioxide, measure key atmospheric variables…

Read More

NASA to Brief Media on Climate Mission to Study Ocean Life, Air

NeRD

NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission, seen here in an artist’s concept, is scheduled to launch no earlier than Feb. 6, 2024, to study Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and climate. NASA/Conceptual Image Laboratory NASA will host a media teleconference at 12 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Jan. 17, to discuss the upcoming launch and science objectives of the agency’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission. Once in orbit above Earth, the satellite will shed light on the impact of tiny things – microscopic life in water and microscopic particles in…

Read More

Kennedy Space Center Looks Ahead to a Busy Year in 2024

NeRD

The mobile launcher, carried by the crawler-transporter 2, rolls out from its park site location to Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in August 2023 for testing ahead of the agency’s Artemis II mission. NASA/Ben Smegelsky Another jam-packed year is in store for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as the momentum of a busy 2023 is carried forward into the new year. On the horizon are missions to the Moon, more crew and cargo flights to the International Space Station, and several upgrade projects across…

Read More