NASA is preparing to launch its newest climate science mission, the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE), which aims to collect brand-new data about how heat is lost to space from Earth’s polar regions.
PREFIRE consists of a pair of cubesats that launch separately into near-polar orbits. The first, Ready, Aim, PREFIRE, is scheduled to launch no earlier than May 22 (NET) 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 micrometers — which accounts for about 60 percent of total heat loss at the poles. “We’ve never measured this before,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, PREFIRE’s lead researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, during a May 15 phone call with reporters. L’Ecuyer says PREFIRE will help scientists study how different properties at the poles, such as clouds, moisture and the fluctuation of the surface between frozen and liquid states, help dissipate heat lost to space.
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The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, causing paradigm shifts for local populations and wildlife habitats at the poles, as well as global impacts such as sea level rise. “Ultimately, [PREFIRE] The information will be combined with our climate models and hopefully we can improve our ability to simulate what sea level rise might look like in the future and how polar climate change will affect weather systems around the planet,” L’Ecuyer said.
The PREFIRE cubesats are each about the size of a loaf of bread and contain identical thermal infrared spectrometers. Although small, their low-cost design and unique purpose fit well into NASA’s growing matrix of climate science missions, such as the much larger Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite to study water levels across the planet. “NASA needs both our large 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 some ways as generalists, rather than specialists, to answer the full range of questions we have about understanding the Earth as a system.”
Each cubesat is equipped with a single infrared spectrometer. Mary White, PREFIRE project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described it as a “scaled down” version of NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) optical system during the May 15 call, pointing out similarities to two other missions that The technology was successfully validated – the Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Diviner Lunar Radiometer experiment on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
The mission’s dual-satellite approach allows researchers to gain a unique perspective on changes at our planet’s poles. “With a cubesat you could sort of map what the emission looks like in the polar regions,” explained L’Ecuyer. “We will use the two cubesats to take measurements over several hours. We will use the difference between these measurements and try to understand how the processes occurring in the Arctic actually affect emissions from the Arctic.”
As with all NASA climate research, PREFIRE data will be available to the public, according to White: “All NASA data is open and freely available to any scientist or any interested person anywhere in the world. This is part of our open science data policy and that would certainly apply to this mission as well.”