NASA’s PREFIRE mission, in collaboration with Rocket Lab, aims to study heat loss from Earth’s polar regions using CubeSats. Scheduled to launch in May 2024 from New Zealand, this mission aims to fill critical gaps in our understanding of the role of polar regions in Earth’s heat budget, impacting global climate models and temperature forecasts. of the sea. Credit: NASA
Data from NASAThe PREFIRE mission will improve our understanding of how the Arctic and Antarctic help regulate Earth’s climate, the mechanisms of polar ice melt, and related issues related to sea level rise and melting ice.
NASA and Rocket Lab are targeting no earlier than Wednesday, May 22, 2024 for the first of two launches of the agency’s Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) mission to study heat loss in space in the polar regions of the Earth. For the PREFIRE mission, two CubeSats will launch on two different flights aboard the company’s Electron rockets from Launch Complex 1 in Māhia, New Zealand. Each launch will carry one satellite.
NASA’s PREFIRE mission will fill a gap in our understanding of how much of Earth’s heat is lost to space from polar regions. By capturing measurements above the poles that can only be collected from space, PREFIRE will allow researchers to systematically study the planet’s heat emissions in the far infrared – with 10 wavelength resolution times thinner than any previous sensor.
PREFIRE’s two small satellites – depicted in an artist’s concept orbiting Earth – will measure the amount of heat radiated into space by the planet’s polar regions. Data from the mission will inform climate and glacial models. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The Arctic and Antarctica help regulate the Earth’s climate by radiating heat initially absorbed in the tropics into space. But for regions like the Arctic, the 60% spectrum of energy escaping to space has not been systematically measured. It is important to complete this table to understand which parts of the polar environment are responsible for heat loss and why the Arctic has warmed more than 2.5 times faster than the rest of the planet. In addition to helping us understand how the poles serve as Earth’s thermostat, PREFIRE observations of this heat exchange can improve our understanding of the mechanisms of polar ice loss and related issues related to sea level rise and to the loss of sea ice.
The instruments will fly on two identical CubeSats – one instrument per CubeSat – in asynchronous, near-polar orbits.
NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison jointly developed the PREFIRE mission. The agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, located in Southern California, manages the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and provided the spectrometers. Blue Canyon Technologies built the CubeSats and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will process the collected data.
The launch, which Rocket Lab has named “Ready, Aim, PREFIRE,” will be followed by a second CubeSat mission launch several weeks later. The second launch, which the company calls “PREFIRE and Ice”, will also take off from New Zealand aboard an Electron rocket. NASA’s Launch Services Program selected Rocket Lab to launch the two spacecraft under the agency’s Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract.
