The first thorough examination of the oceans, lakes, and rivers of the planet by NASA will be launched from Southern California on Thursday.
Surface Water and Ocean Topography, or SWOT, is the name of the NASA-led mission that will be launched in conjunction with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and is intended to provide scientists with a previously unattainable image of around 70% of the Earth’s surface.
The National Research Council has identified 15 missions that the American space agency should launch in the next ten years. One of these missions, SWOT, was created and developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in cooperation with French and Canadian partners.
SWOT, NASA’s mission will provide a brand-new, revolutionary perspective of one of our most important resources.
It will provide a novel, ground-breaking perspective on the planet’s water bodies, one of our most important resources, and shed new light on the mechanisms underlying how climate change is influencing them.
The SpaceX Falcon9 rocket, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, was scheduled to launch from the Vandenberg US Space Force Base early on Thursday morning to deliver SWOT into orbit.
Over 20 years have gone into developing SWOT, according to Reuters. Scientists predict that it will collect height-surface measurements of water bodies (oceans, lakes, reservoirs, and rivers) over 90% of the planet using cutting-edge microwave radar technology.
SWOT is equipped with Ka-band frequency
It has a Ka-band microwave antenna that enables scanning in spite of cloud cover or nighttime, enabling 2D dimensions regardless of the time of day or weather.
Additionally, the research will support weather and climate predictions, improve ocean circulation models, and aid in managing places with limited freshwater resources due to drought.
The satellite will gather data over a period of months as planned. Sweeps that will be conducted twice every 21 days will be used to compile the data.
“It’s really the first mission to observe nearly all water on the planet’s surface,” said JPL scientist Ben Hamlington.
This mission will gather the pulse of worlds water system
According to Tamlin Pavelsky, the SWOT freshwater research lead at NASA, gathering such data was like “taking the pulse of the world’s water system, so we’ll be able to see when it’s racing and we’ll be able to see when it’s slow.”
We are aware that 90% or more of the excess heat held in Earth’s atmosphere is absorbed by the planet’s seas. The goal of SWOT is to investigate how human activity-related heat and the greenhouse gas emissions it causes affect climate change and stabilise world temperatures.