NASA is preparing to launch its latest climate science mission, the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE), which aims to capture brand new data on how heat is lost from Earth’s polar regions to space .
PREFIRE consists of a pair of cubesats launched separately into near-polar orbits. The first, “Ready, Aim, PREFIRE,” will launch no earlier than (NET) May 22 on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Pad B at the company’s Launch Complex 1 in Māhia, New Zealand. The second cubesat, “PREFIRE and ICE”, will be launched a few days later.
The pair is designed to measure far-infrared radiation – wavelengths longer than 15 microns – which are responsible for about 60 percent of the total heat lost at the poles. “We’ve never measured that before,” Tristan L’Ecuyer, principal investigator of PREFIRE at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on a call with reporters on May 15. L’Ecuyer says PREFIRE will help scientists study how different properties at the poles, such as clouds, humidity and the surface’s fluctuation between frozen and liquid states, contribute to the dissipation of heat lost to space.
Related: NASA selects Rocket Lab for back-to-back launches of climate change research
The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, leading to paradigm shifts for local people and wildlife habitats at the poles, as well as global impacts such as rising sea levels. “Finally, [PREFIRE] information will be combined with our climate models and hopefully we will be able to improve our ability to simulate what sea level rise could look like in the future, and also how polar climate change will affect weather systems around the world. planet,” L’Ecuyer said.
The PREFIRE cubesats are each about the size of a loaf of bread and contain identical thermal infrared spectrometers. Although small, their cost-effective design and unique purpose fit nicely into NASA’s growing matrix of climate research missions, such as the much larger SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite for studying water levels across the planet. “NASA needs both our big missions and these smaller missions,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division at the agency’s headquarters. “You can think of them in a sense as generalists versus specialists to answer the full range of questions we have about understanding the Earth as a system.”
Each cubesat is equipped with a single infrared spectrometer. Mary White, PREFIRE project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described them during the May 15 call as a “scaled-down” version of NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) optical system and pointed out similarities with two additional missions that successfully completed validated the 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 mission’s dual-satellite approach will allow researchers to gain a unique perspective on the changes taking place at our planet’s poles. “Having one cubesat would be able to map what emissions look like in the polar regions,” L’Ecuyer explains. “We will use the two cubesats to take measurements over the course of several hours, taking the difference between those measurements and trying to understand how the processes taking place in the Arctic are actually affecting Arctic emissions.”
As with all NASA climate research, White says PREFIRE data will be accessible to the public: “All NASA data is open and freely available to all scientists or all people of interest around the world. That’s part of our open science data policy, and that would certainly be true for this mission.”