Sometime in the next several years- no one knows precisely when- three Nasa satellites, each one as large as an elephant, did go black. Now they are drifting, losing level bit by bit. They have been gazing down at the world for over two decades, much longer than people expected, helping us estimates the wind, manage wildfires, check fuel spills and more. However, they are getting older, and they will immediately begin sending their last messages to Earth. It’s a time researchers are dreading.
When the three satellites- Terra, Aqua and Aura- are powered down, much of the information they’ve been collecting may end with them, and newer satellites did n’t pull up all of the loose. Experts will either need to concentrate on alternative options that might not be able to fulfill their specific requirements or look for ways to keep their records. The condition is worse because no other tools will continue to gather the data that these satellites collect.
The wonderful details about our globe will deteriorate significantly in the coming years. ” Losing this unique information is simply tragic”, said Susan Solomon, an ambient scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We appear to be seriously asleep at the wheel when the earth needs us to concentrate on understanding how we are affecting it and how we are doing it.
The main place we’re losing eyes on is the ether, the all- important residence of the oxygen layer. Across the stratosphere’s warm, thin air, oxygen molecules are continually being formed and destroyed, tossed and swept, as they interact with other chemicals. Some of these gases were created naturally, while others were created by humans. An instrument on Aura, the microwave limb sounder, gives us our best line of sight into this seething chemical drama, said Ross J. Salawitch, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland. Once Aura is gone, our vision will dim considerably.
According to Salawitch, the microwave limb sounder’s data has recently been unexpectedly proving its worth. It demonstrated how much ozone was impacted by the devastating wildfires that occurred in Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 as well as the subsea volcanic eruption that occurred near Tonga in 2022. It also helped to illustrate how much East Asia’s summer monsoon-depleting pollution was being pushed into the stratosphere by the region’s monsoon.
If it were n’t going offline so soon, the sounder might also help unravel a big mystery, Salawitch said. Over the past ten years, he claimed,” the thickness of the ozone layer over densely populated areas in the Northern Hemisphere has hardly changed.” ” It should be recovering. And it’s not”.
Jack Kaye, the associate director of research at Nasa’s Earth Science Division, acknowledged researchers ‘ concerns about the end of the sounder. However, he argued that other sources, such as those on the International Space Station and the International Space Station, would still be able to “provide a pretty good window into what the atmosphere is doing” Financial realities force Nasa to make” tough decisions”, Kaye said.
The differences between the same amount of data and almost the same amount of data can be significant for scientists studying our changing planet. They might believe they are aware of how something is evolving. But only by monitoring it continuously, in an unchanging way, over a long stretch of time, can they be confident about what’s going on. Even a fleeting pause in the records can cause issues.
NASA surveyed scientists last year to see what their opinions would be about how Terra, Aqua, and Aura’s closure would impact their work. Over 180 answered the call. Even if there are alternate sources for this information, the scientists wrote, they might be less frequent, or of lower resolution, or limited to certain times of day, all factors that shape how useful the data is.
The way we monitor another significant factor in our climate, the amount of solar radiation that the planet receives, absorbs, and bounces back into space, will change as a result of Terra and Aqua’s end. How much of the Earth warms or cools depends on these values. And to understand it, scientists rely on the instruments of Nasa’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, or CERES. Right now, four satellites are flying with CERES instruments: Terra, Aqua, plus two newer ones that are nearing their end. nyt
