NASA is preparing to launch its latest climate science mission, the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE), which aims to capture brand new data on how heat is lost to space from Earth’s polar regions.
PREFIRE consists of a pair of cubesats that will be launched separately into near-polar orbits. The first, “Ready, Aim, PREFIRE,” is set to launch no earlier than (NET) May 22, on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from Pad B at the company’s Launch Complex 1, in Māhia, New Zealand. The second cubesat, “PREFIRE and ICE”, will launch a few days later.
The pair is designed to measure far-infrared radiation — wavelengths longer than 15 microns — which accounts for about 60 percent of total heat loss at the poles. “We’ve never measured this before,” University of Wisconsin-Madison PREFIRE principal investigator Tristan L’Equière said during a May 15 call with reporters. L’Ecuyer says PREFIRE will help scientists study how different properties of the poles, such as clouds, humidity and surface fluctuations between frozen and liquid states, contribute to the dissipation of heat lost to space.
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The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, leading to paradigm shifts for local populations and wildlife habitats at the poles, as well as global consequences such as sea level rise. “Eventually, [PREFIRE] The information will be combined with our climate models and we hope to be able to improve our ability to simulate what sea level rise might look like in the future, and also how polar climate change will affect weather systems around a planet,” said L ‘Ecuyer.
Each PREFIRE cubic sat is about the size of a loaf of bread and contains identical thermal infrared spectrometers. Although small, their cost-effective design and unique purpose fit nicely into NASA’s growing matrix of climate research missions, such as the much larger SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite to study water levels around the planet. “NASA needs both our big missions and these smaller missions,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division at the agency’s headquarters. “You can think of them in a way as generalists versus specialists to answer this full set of questions that we have about understanding the Earth as a system.”
Each cubesat is equipped with one infrared spectrometer. Mary White, PREFIRE project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described them as a “scaled-down” version of NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) optical system during the May 15 call and pointed to similarities with two additional missions that are successfully validated the technology—the Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
The mission’s dual satellite approach allows researchers to gain a unique perspective on the changes taking place at the poles of our planet. “Having a cubesat will be able to map what the emission looks like in the polar regions,” explained L’Ecuyer. “We’re going to use the two cubes to make measurements over several hours, taking the difference between those measurements and trying to understand how the processes that are happening in the Arctic actually affect emissions from the Arctic.”
As with all NASA climate research, White says the PREFIRE data will be available to the public: “All NASA data is open and freely available to any scientist or any interested person around the world. That’s part of our open science data policy, and that would certainly be true for this mission.”
