5 months ago
27
A tiny Nasa
satellite
was launched Saturday from New Zealand with the mission of improving
climate change prediction
by measuring heat escaping from
Earth's poles
for the first time. "This new information - and we've never had it before - will improve our ability to model what's happening in the poles, what's happening in climate," Nasa's earth sciences research director Karen St Germain told a news conference.
The satellite, which is the size of a shoe box, was launched by an Electron rocket, built by a company called Rocket Lab.
The overall mission is called PREFIRE. It will serve to take
infrared measurements
far above the Arctic and Antarctic so as to measure directly the heat that the poles release into space. " The process of getting the heat from the tropical regions to the polar regions is actually what drives all of our weather around the planet," said Tristan L'Ecuyer, a mission researcher affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, Madison. With PREFIRE,
Nasa
aims to understand how clouds, humidity or the melting of ice into water affects this heat loss from the poles.
Until now the models that climate change scientists used to gauge heat loss were based on theories rather than real observations, said L'Ecuyer.
Small satellites like this one are low-cost "specialitsts" that will answer very specific scientific questions, said St Germain.
