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By European Space Agency
Launched just seven months ago, ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite has been proving how the New Space approach can accelerate the development of missions capable of delivering detailed temperature and humidity profiles for short-term weather forecasts.
Moreover, the impact of this tiny prototype satellite goes even further – its measuring instrument has been recognised as able to provide data that’s on a par with traditional large missions.
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By European Space Agency
Two spacecraft flying as one – that is the goal of European Space Agency’s Proba-3 mission. Earlier this week, the eclipse-maker moved a step closer to achieving that goal, as both spacecraft aligned with the Sun, maintaining their relative position for several hours without any control from the ground.
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Located off the coast of Ecuador, Paramount seamount is among the kinds of ocean floor features that certain ocean-observing satellites like SWOT can detect by how their gravitational pull affects the sea surface.NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program More accurate maps based on data from the SWOT mission can improve underwater navigation and result in greater knowledge of how heat and life move around the world’s ocean.
There are better maps of the Moon’s surface than of the bottom of Earth’s ocean. Researchers have been working for decades to change that. As part of the ongoing effort, a NASA-supported team recently published one of the most detailed maps yet of the ocean floor, using data from the SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite, a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales).
Ships outfitted with sonar instruments can make direct, incredibly detailed measurements of the ocean floor. But to date, only about 25% of it has been surveyed in this way. To produce a global picture of the seafloor, researchers have relied on satellite data.
This animation shows seafloor features derived from SWOT data on regions off Mexico, South America, and the Antarctic Peninsula. Purple denotes regions that are lower relative to higher areas like seamounts, depicted in green. Eötvös is the unit of measure for the gravity-based data used to create these maps.
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio Why Seafloor Maps Matter
More accurate maps of the ocean floor are crucial for a range of seafaring activities, including navigation and laying underwater communications cables. “Seafloor mapping is key in both established and emerging economic opportunities, including rare-mineral seabed mining, optimizing shipping routes, hazard detection, and seabed warfare operations,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of physical oceanography programs at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Accurate seafloor maps are also important for an improved understanding of deep-sea currents and tides, which affect life in the abyss, as well as geologic processes like plate tectonics. Underwater mountains called seamounts and other ocean floor features like their smaller cousins, abyssal hills, influence the movement of heat and nutrients in the deep sea and can attract life. The effects of these physical features can even be felt at the surface by the influence they exert on ecosystems that human communities depend on.
This map of seafloor features like abyssal hills in the Indian Ocean is based on sea surface height data from the SWOT satellite. Purple denotes regions that are lower relative to higher areas like abyssal hills, depicted in green. Eötvös is the unit of measure for the gravity-based data used to create these maps.NASA Earth Observatory This global map of seafloor features is based on ocean height data from the SWOT satellite. Purple denotes regions that are lower compared to higher features such as seamounts and abyssal hills, depicted in green. Eötvös is the unit of measure for the gravity-based data used to create these maps.NASA Earth Observatory This map of ocean floor features like seamounts southwest of Acapulco, Mexico, is based on sea surface height data from SWOT. Purple denotes regions that are lower relative to higher areas like seamounts, indicated with green. Eötvös is the unit of measure for the gravity-based data used to create these maps.NASA Earth Observatory Mapping the seafloor isn’t the SWOT mission’s primary purpose. Launched in December 2022, the satellite measures the height of water on nearly all of Earth’s surface, including the ocean, lakes, reservoirs, and rivers. Researchers can use these differences in height to create a kind of topographic map of the surface of fresh- and seawater. This data can then be used for tasks such as assessing changes in sea ice or tracking how floods progress down a river.
“The SWOT satellite was a huge jump in our ability to map the seafloor,” said David Sandwell, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. He’s used satellite data to chart the bottom of the ocean since the 1990s and was one of the researchers responsible for the SWOT-based seafloor map, which was published in the journal Science in December 2024.
How It Works
The study authors relied the fact that because geologic features like seamounts and abyssal hills have more mass than their surroundings, they exert a slightly stronger gravitational pull that creates small, measurable bumps in the sea surface above them. These subtle gravity signatures help researchers predict the kind of seafloor feature that produced them.
Through repeated observations — SWOT covers about 90% of the globe every 21 days — the satellite is sensitive enough to pick up these minute differences, with centimeter-level accuracy, in sea surface height caused by the features below. Sandwell and his colleagues used a year’s worth of SWOT data to focus on seamounts, abyssal hills, and underwater continental margins, where continental crust meets oceanic crust.
Previous ocean-observing satellites have detected massive versions of these bottom features, such as seamounts over roughly 3,300 feet (1 kilometer) tall. The SWOT satellite can pick up seamounts less than half that height, potentially increasing the number of known seamounts from 44,000 to 100,000. These underwater mountains stick up into the water, influencing deep sea currents. This can concentrate nutrients along their slopes, attracting organisms and creating oases on what would otherwise be barren patches of seafloor.
Looking Into the Abyss
The improved view from SWOT also gives researchers more insight into the geologic history of the planet.
“Abyssal hills are the most abundant landform on Earth, covering about 70% of the ocean floor,” said Yao Yu, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and lead author on the paper. “These hills are only a few kilometers wide, which makes them hard to observe from space. We were surprised that SWOT could see them so well.”
Abyssal hills form in parallel bands, like the ridges on a washboard, where tectonic plates spread apart. The orientation and extent of the bands can reveal how tectonic plates have moved over time. Abyssal hills also interact with tides and deep ocean currents in ways that researchers don’t fully understand yet.
The researchers have extracted nearly all the information on seafloor features they expected to find in the SWOT measurements. Now they’re focusing on refining their picture of the ocean floor by calculating the depth of the features they see. The work complements an effort by the international scientific community to map the entire seafloor using ship-based sonar by 2030. “We won’t get the full ship-based mapping done by then,” said Sandwell. “But SWOT will help us fill it in, getting us close to achieving the 2030 objective.”
More About SWOT
The SWOT satellite was jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the U.S. component of the project. For the flight system payload, NASA provided the Ka-band radar interferometer (KaRIn) instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. The Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite system, the dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), the KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Thales Alenia Space and with support from the UK Space Agency), the satellite platform, and ground operations were provided by CNES. The KaRIn high-power transmitter assembly was provided by CSA.
To learn more about SWOT, visit:
https://swot.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
2025-040
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Last Updated Mar 19, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Explore This Section Perseverance Home Mission Overview Rover Components Mars Rock Samples Where is Perseverance? Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mission Updates Science Overview Objectives Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Perseverance Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 2 min read
Navigating a Slanted River
Finessing a fractured rock: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image showing the “Slants River” target, which fractured after being abraded by the rover. Perseverance captured the image using its SHERLOC WATSON camera, located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) is an instrument using cameras, spectrometers, and a laser to search for organics and minerals that have been altered by watery environments and may be signs of past microbial life. In addition to its black-and-white context camera, SHERLOC is assisted by WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering), a color camera for taking close-up images of rock grains and surface textures. In the case of Slants River, thanks to work by the team’s rover planners and engineers, in spite of the fracture SHERLOC was able to maneuver close to this topographically-challenging surface and conduct a spectroscopy scan. This important activity enabled the team to collect the Main River core, just next to this abrasion patch. Perseverance acquired this image on March 5, 2025 — sol 1436, or Martian day 1,436 of the Mars 2020 mission — at the local mean solar time of 14:29:29. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Denise Buckner, student collaborator at University of Florida
Perseverance is hard at work on Mars, overcoming obstacles for scientific exploration! Just a few sols after successfully sealing the challenging Green Gardens core, Perseverance roved on to the Broom Point workspace to collect another sample called Main River. Broom Point is situated a few hundred meters down-slope from where Green Gardens was collected, and the Science Team chose to explore this area because orbiter images show some intriguing, alternating light and dark layers.
Upon reaching the workspace, images captured by Perseverance confirm that these distinct layers are visible on the ground, as well. Layers are interesting because they record different geological events that occurred in the planet’s past, which may include deposition of sediments, lava flows, or volcanic ash. By conducting proximity science with rover instruments and collecting a core to return to Earth for future analyses, the team is investigating what this material is composed of and how it was emplaced.
When the team is planning to collect a sample from an outcrop, the first step is to abrade the rock, grinding away the top few millimeters and smoothing out the surface so the SHERLOC and PIXL instruments can move in and conduct their scans. Although Perseverance has abraded more than 30 rocks across Jezero crater, new rocks still present unique challenges. While abrading the Slants River target at Broom Point, the rock unexpectedly fractured, resulting in an uneven surface. SHERLOC and PIXL require just a few millimeters of clearance to safely approach the rock, and while PIXL was able to reach the broken surface, the topography looked a little more dicey for SHERLOC.
The team’s engineers and rover planners took stock of the situation and decided to use WATSON, SHERLOC’s companion camera, to snap some images of the abrasion patch from another angle. These images built a surface model of the small cracks and crevices, and with this knowledge in hand, the team found a way to safely maneuver the instrument to the same spot that PIXL scanned, and collected a co-located spectroscopy map. Once this abrasion proximity science was completed, the rover went on to drill and seal the Main River core, an activity that went off without a hitch.
With another core in the bag, Perseverance is off to the next workspace, ready to tackle whatever challenges may lie ahead!
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Last Updated Mar 13, 2025 Related Terms
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