A small NASA satellite intended to measure heat loss in detail for the first time took off into space across the Earth 's poles from New Zealand.
Called PREFIRE , the mission should improve scientists' forecasts related to climate change.
"This new information, which we have never had in the past, will help us model what is happening at the poles and in the climate," Karen St. Germain, director of scientific research related to Earth, said at a press conference in mid-May. NASA Earth.
The satellite, the size of a shoe box, was launched by an Electron rocket from the company Rocket Lab from Mahia, in northern New Zealand. The same company will later launch a similar satellite.
Both will be used to make far-infrared measurements over the Arctic and Antarctic, to directly quantify the heat released into space for the first time.
This phenomenon is "crucial because it helps balance the excess heat received from tropical regions and regulate the Earth's temperature," explained Tristan L'Ecuyer, scientific director of the mission at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
"The process that brings heat from the tropics to the poles is what is at the origin of our meteorology," he added.
Thanks to PREFIRE, NASA aims to understand how clouds, humidity or even the transformation of a frozen surface into liquid influence this heat loss. Until now, the models used by scientists to anticipate global warming are based, with respect to this parameter, only on theories and not on real observations, explained Tristan L'Ecuyer.
"We hope to improve our ability to simulate future sea level rise, as well as how climate change at the poles will affect the planet's weather systems," he explained.
This satellite joins more than twenty NASA missions in charge of observing the Earth, already in orbit.
Small satellites, called Cubesats , represent a real opportunity to answer "very specific" questions "at a lower cost," explained Karen St. Germain.
If the most traditional large satellites can be considered "generalist", these small devices are comparable to the "specialist" ones, he stressed. "NASA needs them both."
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