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US, Germany Partnering on Mission to Track Earth’s Water Movement


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An engineering geologist measures water depth at an agricultural well in a field north of Sacramento, California. Groundwater is an important source of water for irrigation in the state’s Central Valley, especially during times of drought, and the GRACE missions provide data that helps track the resource.
Kelly M. Grow/California Department of Water Resources

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment-Continuity mission will extend a decades-long record of following shifting water masses using gravity measurements.

NASA and the German Space Agency at DLR (German Aerospace Center) have agreed to jointly build, launch, and operate a pair of spacecraft that will yield insights into how Earth’s water, ice, and land masses are shifting by measuring monthly changes in the planet’s gravity field. Tracking large-scale mass changes – showing when and where water moves within and between the atmosphere, oceans, underground aquifers, and ice sheets – provides a view into Earth’s water cycle, including changes in response to drivers like climate change.

With the international agreement signed in late 2023, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment-Continuity (GRACE-C) mission will extend a nearly 25-year legacy that began with the 2002 launch of the GRACE mission. The GRACE-Follow On (GRACE-FO) mission succeeded GRACE in 2018. GRACE-C is targeting a launch no earlier than 2028.

The data from the GRACE missions is considered key information in characterizing Earth’s climate. Those measurements, together with other information and computer models, are regularly used for drought assessment and forecasting, water-use planning for agriculture, and understanding the drivers of sea level rise, such as how much ice the world’s ice sheets are losing.

“GRACE-C represents an international and collaborative effort to observe and study one of our planet’s most precious resources,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for science at NASA in Washington. “From our coastlines to our kitchen tables, there is no aspect of our planet that is not impacted by changes in the water cycle. The partnership between NASA and the German Aerospace Center will serve a critical role in preparing for the challenges we face today and tomorrow.”

Engineers and scientists are finalizing design details for the instruments and satellites, and then teams will start work on fabricating and building. The mission will be composed of a pair of identical satellites flying one behind the other, roughly 60 to 190 miles (100 to 300 kilometers) apart, in a polar orbit. The spacecraft will fly at an altitude of roughly 300 miles (500 kilometers). Together they will monitor monthly changes to the distribution of water on Earth from variations in the planet’s gravity field.

Following the Water

The pull of gravity varies naturally from place to place on Earth depending on the mass distribution near the surface. For instance, large shifts in underground water storage (groundwater) or losses from ice sheets move a great amount of mass around, which can in turn shift the planet’s gravity field on weekly to monthly time scales.

Researchers can gauge those changes by measuring very small changes in the distance between the two GRACE-C satellites. As the lead spacecraft flies over an area with relatively more mass – like a spot with more groundwater than its surroundings – the slight increase in Earth’s gravity field pulls the satellite forward, increasing its distance from the trailing spacecraft. Capable of measuring distance changes 100 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair, a laser ranging interferometer (LRI) instrument continually measures the distance between the two spacecraft.

The satellite systems and orbit for GRACE-C will be similar to those of GRACE-FO, ensuring the continuity of measurements between the two missions.

“GRACE-C will build on decades of observations of the global movement of water and changes in water resources. This is critical to informing predictions of future trends in our climate and to assess food and water security,” said Frank Webb, GRACE-C project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The mission is an example of the commitment that NASA and our German partners share for studying the Earth and helping society better prepare for a warming world.”

GRACE-C, previously known as the Mass Change mission, addresses one of the key goals outlined in the 2017 Decadal Survey for Earth Science conducted by the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine: to better understand the planet’s global water cycle through large-scale changes in Earth’s mass.

“Together with NASA, we are now continuing along the GRACE route in Earth observation, thereby strengthening our international cooperation in space-based research,” said Walther Pelzer, a member of the DLR executive board and director general of the German Space Agency at DLR. “The USA and Germany have been working closely together for a long time on climate and environmental research from space. The trust that our U.S. partners are placing in German space expertise for these missions by commissioning the satellite construction and the delivery of important parts of the GRACE-C instrumentation and mission control is also a sign of Germany’s capabilities as a prime location for spaceflight.”

The mission will be part of NASA’s Earth System Observatory (ESO), a set of Earth-focused missions that will provide data to guide efforts related to climate change, natural hazard mitigation, wildfire management, and food security. When combined, ESO mission data will create a holistic view of Earth from the planet’s atmosphere to its bedrock.

More About the Mission

JPL manages the GRACE-C mission for NASA and will procure the two spacecraft from Airbus Defence and Space, the company that built the satellites for the GRACE and GRACE-FO missions. Development and construction of the LRI system will be led by JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena. The German contributions are funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The German Space Agency at DLR will manage the German contributions to GRACE-C, providing the LRI optics subsystems; mission operations; telemetry, tracking, and command; the ground data system; the laser retroreflectors to help with satellite positioning; the launch vehicle; and launch services.

To learn more about GRACE-FO, visit:

https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/

News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov

2024-030

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      NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024. The space telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy across the entire sky, capturing the universe in more than 100 colors. BAE Systems The space telescope will detect over 100 colors from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Here’s what astronomers will do with all that color.
      NASA’s SPHEREx mission won’t be the first space telescope to observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies when it launches no later than April 2025, but it will be the first to observe them in 102 colors. Although these colors aren’t visible to the human eye because they’re in the infrared range, scientists will use them to learn about topics that range from the physics that governed the universe less than a second after its birth to the origins of water on planets like Earth.
      “We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colors,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based jointly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, both in Southern California. “Whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries.”
      Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx will collect infrared light, which has wavelengths slightly longer than what the human eye can detect. The telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy to take the light from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies and separate it into individual colors, the way a prism transforms sunlight into a rainbow. This color breakdown can reveal various properties of an object, including its composition and its distance from Earth.
      NASA’s SPHEREx mission will use spectroscopy — the splitting of light into its component wavelengths — to study the universe. Watch this video to learn more about spectroscopy. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Here are the three key science investigations SPHEREx will conduct with its colorful all-sky map.
      Cosmic Origins
      What human eyes perceive as colors are distinct wavelengths of light. The only difference between colors is the distance between the crests of the light wave. If a star or galaxy is moving, its light waves get stretched or compressed, changing the colors they appear to emit. (It’s the same with sound waves, which is why the pitch of an ambulance siren seems to go up as its approaches and lowers after it passes.) Astronomers can measure the degree to which light is stretched or compressed and use that to infer the distance to the object.
      SPHEREx will apply this principle to map the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D. By doing so, scientists can study the physics of inflation, the event that caused the universe to expand by a trillion-trillion fold in less than a second after the big bang. This rapid expansion amplified small differences in the distribution of matter. Because these differences remain imprinted on the distribution of galaxies today, measuring how galaxies are distributed can tell scientists more about how inflation worked.
      Galactic Origins
      SPHEREx will also measure the collective glow created by all galaxies near and far — in other words, the total amount of light emitted by galaxies over cosmic history. Scientists have tried to estimate this total light output by observing individual galaxies and extrapolating to the trillions of galaxies in the universe. But these counts may leave out some faint or hidden light sources, such as galaxies too small or too distant for telescopes to easily detect.
      With spectroscopy, SPHEREx can also show astronomers how the total light output has changed over time. For example, it may reveal that the universe’s earliest generations of galaxies produced more light than previously thought, either because they were more plentiful or bigger and brighter than current estimates suggest. Because light takes time to travel through space, we see distant objects as they were in the past. And, as light travels, the universe’s expansion stretches it, changing its wavelength and its color. Scientists can therefore use SPHEREx data to determine how far light has traveled and where in the universe’s history it was released.
      Water’s Origins
      SPHEREx will measure the abundance of frozen water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients for life as we know it along more than 9 million unique directions across the Milky Way galaxy. This information will help scientists better understand how available these key molecules are to forming planets. Research indicates that most of the water in our galaxy is in the form of ice rather than gas, frozen to the surface of small dust grains. In dense clouds where stars form, these icy dust grains can become part of newly forming planets, with the potential to create oceans like the ones on Earth.
      The mission’s colorful view will enable scientists to identify these materials, because chemical elements and molecules leave a unique signature in the colors they absorb and emit.
      Big Picture
      Many space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and James Webb, can provide high-resolution, in-depth spectroscopy of individual objects or small sections of space. Other space telescopes, like NASA’s retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), were designed to take images of the whole sky. SPHEREx combines these abilities to apply spectroscopy to the entire sky.
      By combining observations from telescopes that target specific parts of the sky with SPHEREx’s big-picture view, scientists will get a more complete — and more colorful — perspective of the universe.
      More About SPHEREx
      SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available.
      For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:
      https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/spherex/
      News Media Contact
      Calla Cofield
      Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
      626-808-2469
      calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
      2024-152
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      Last Updated Oct 31, 2024 Related Terms
      SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Galaxies Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Search for Life The Universe Explore More
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