Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
Europe’s all-new weather satellite takes to the skies
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Piloted by NASA’s Tim Williams, the ER-2 science aircraft ascends for one of the final science flights for the GSFC Lidar Observation and Validation Experiment (GLOVE) on Feb. 1, 2025. As a collaboration between engineers, scientists, and aircraft professionals, GLOVE aims to improve satellite data products for Earth Science applications. NASA/Steve Freeman In February, NASA’s ER-2 science aircraft flew instruments designed to improve satellite data products and Earth science observations. From data collection to processing, satellite systems continue to advance, and NASA is exploring how instruments analyzing clouds can improve data measurement methods.
Researchers participating in the Goddard Space Flight Center Lidar Observation and Validation Experiment (GLOVE) used the ER-2 – based at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California – to validate satellite data about cloud and airborne particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists are using GLOVE instruments installed onboard the aircraft to measure and validate data about clouds generated by satellite sensors already orbiting in space around Earth.
“The GLOVE data will allow us to test new artificial intelligence algorithms in data processing,” said John Yorks, principal investigator for GLOVE and research physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These algorithms aim to improve the cloud and aerosol detection in data produced by the satellites.”
Jennifer Moore, a researcher from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, checks the cabling on the Roscoe instrument at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, for the GSFC Lidar Observation and Validation Experiment (GLOVE) on Feb. 1, 2025. The Roscoe instrument will be uploaded onto NASA’s ER-2 science aircraft.NASA/Steve Freeman The validation provided by GLOVE is crucial because it ensures the accuracy and reliability of satellite data. “The instruments on the plane provide a higher resolution measurement ‘truth’ to ensure the data is a true representation of the atmospheric scene being sampled,” Yorks said.
The ER-2 flew over various parts of Oregon, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, as well as over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. These regions reflected various types of atmospheres, including cirrus clouds, marine stratocumulus, rain and snow, and areas with multiple types of clouds.
“The goal is to improve satellite data products for Earth science applications,” Yorks said. “These measurements allow scientists and decision-makers to confidently use this satellite information for applications like weather forecasting and hazard monitoring.”
Researcher Jackson Begolka from the University of Iowa examines instrument connectors onboard the ER-2 aircraft at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, on Feb. 1, 2025. The GLOVE instrument will validate data from satellites orbiting the Earth.NASA/Steve Freeman The four instruments installed on the ER-2 were the Cloud Physics Lidar, the Roscoe Lidar, the enhanced Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Airborne Simulator, and the Cloud Radar System. These instruments validate data produced by sensors on NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) and the Earth Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE), a joint venture between the ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency).
“Additionally, the EarthCARE satellite is flying the first ever Doppler radar for measurements of air motions within clouds,” Yorks said. While the ER-2 is operated by pilots and aircrew from NASA Armstrong, these instruments are supported by scientists from NASA Goddard, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and the Naval Research Laboratory office in Monterey, California, as well as by students from the University of Iowa in Iowa City and the University of Maryland College Park.
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 16, 2025 EditorDede DiniusContactErica HeimLocationArmstrong Flight Research Center Related Terms
Armstrong Flight Research Center Airborne Science Earth Science Earth Science Technology Office Earth's Atmosphere ER-2 Goddard Space Flight Center Explore More
4 min read Hubble Provides New View of Galactic Favorite
As part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations, the European Space Agency (ESA) is sharing a new…
Article 9 hours ago 4 min read NASA Aims to Fly First Quantum Sensor for Gravity Measurements
Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, private companies, and academic institutions are…
Article 1 day ago 5 min read Can Solar Wind Make Water on Moon? NASA Experiment Shows Maybe
Scientists have hypothesized since the 1960s that the Sun is a source of ingredients that…
Article 1 day ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Armstrong Flight Research Center
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
The first of the new generation of MetOp satellites, MetOp-SG Satellite-A, together with the instrument for the Copernicus Sentinel-5 mission, are now ready to be shipped to their launch site. But before the last leg of their terrestrial journey, they were on display to the media at Airbus’s facilities in Toulouse, France.
View the full article
-
By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s SPHEREx, which will map millions of galaxies across the entire sky, captured one of its first exposures March 27. The observatory’s six detectors each captured one of these uncalibrated images, to which visible-light colors have been added to represent infrared wavelengths. SPHEREx’s complete field of view spans the top three images; the same area of the sky is also captured in the bottom three images. NASA/JPL-Caltech Processed with rainbow hues to represent a range of infrared wavelengths, the new pictures indicate the astrophysics space observatory is working as expected.
NASA’s SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) has turned on its detectors for the first time in space. Initial images from the observatory, which launched March 11, confirm that all systems are working as expected.
Although the new images are uncalibrated and not yet ready to use for science, they give a tantalizing look at SPHEREx’s wide view of the sky. Each bright spot is a source of light, like a star or galaxy, and each image is expected to contain more than 100,000 detected sources.
There are six images in every SPHEREx exposure — one for each detector. The top three images show the same area of sky as the bottom three images. This is the observatory’s full field of view, a rectangular area about 20 times wider than the full Moon. When SPHEREx begins routine science operations in late April, it will take approximately 600 exposures every day.
Each image in this uncalibrated SPHEREx exposure contains about 100,000 light sources, including stars and galaxies. The two insets at right zoom in on sections of one image, showcasing the telescope’s ability to capture faint, distant galaxies. These sections are processed in grayscale rather than visible-light color for ease of viewing.NASA/JPL-Caltech “Our spacecraft has opened its eyes on the universe,” said Olivier Doré, SPHEREx project scientist at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Southern California. “It’s performing just as it was designed to.”
The SPHEREx observatory detects infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. To make these first images, science team members assigned a visible color to every infrared wavelength captured by the observatory. Each of the six SPHEREx detectors has 17 unique wavelength bands, for a total of 102 hues in every six-image exposure.
Breaking down color this way can reveal the composition of an object or the distance to a galaxy. With that data, scientists can study topics ranging from the physics that governed the universe less than a second after its birth to the origins of water in our galaxy.
“This is the high point of spacecraft checkout; it’s the thing we wait for,” said Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx deputy project manager at JPL. “There’s still work to do, but this is the big payoff. And wow! Just wow!”
During the past two weeks, scientists and engineers at JPL, which manages the mission for NASA, have executed a series of spacecraft checks that show all is well so far. In addition, SPHEREx’s detectors and other hardware have been cooling down to their final temperature of around minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (about minus 210 degrees Celsius). This is necessary because heat can overwhelm the telescope’s ability to detect infrared light, which is sometimes called heat radiation. The new images also show that the telescope is focused correctly. Focusing is done entirely before launch and cannot be adjusted in space.
“Based on the images we are seeing, we can now say that the instrument team nailed it,” said Jamie Bock, SPHEREx’s principal investigator at Caltech and JPL.
How It Works
Where telescopes like NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes were designed to target small areas of space in detail, SPHEREx is a survey telescope and takes a broad view. Combining its results with those of targeted telescopes will give scientists a more robust understanding of our universe.
The observatory will map the entire celestial sky four times during its two-year prime mission. Using a technique called spectroscopy, SPHEREx will collect the light from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies in more wavelengths any other all-sky survey telescope.
Track the real-time location of NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory using the agency’s 3D visualization tool, Eyes on the Solar System. When light enters SPHEREx’s telescope, it’s directed down two paths that each lead to a row of three detectors. The observatory’s detectors are like eyes, and set on top of them are color filters, which are like color-tinted glasses. While a standard color filter blocks all wavelengths but one, like yellow- or rose-tinted glasses, the SPHEREx filters are more like rainbow-tinted glasses: The wavelengths they block change gradually from the top of the filter to the bottom.
“I’m rendered speechless,” said Jim Fanson, SPHEREx project manager at JPL. “There was an incredible human effort to make this possible, and our engineering team did an amazing job getting us to this point.”
More About SPHEREx
The SPHEREx mission is managed by JPL for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. 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 in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Caltech managed and integrated the instrument. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech. The mission’s principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available at the NASA-IPAC Infrared Science Archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more about SPHEREx, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
2025-045
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 01, 2025 Related Terms
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Galaxies Origin & Evolution of the Universe The Search for Life The Universe Explore More
3 min read Discovery Alert: Four Little Planets, One Big Step
The Discovery Four rocky planets much smaller than Earth orbit Barnard’s Star, the next closest…
Article 13 hours ago 5 min read NASA Awards Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships for 2025
The highly competitive NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) recently named 24 new fellows to its…
Article 1 day ago 2 min read Hubble Spots a Chance Alignment
The subject of today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is the stunning spiral galaxy NGC…
Article 4 days ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
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.
View the full article
-
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.