{"id":16638,"date":"2015-01-25T17:28:06","date_gmt":"2015-01-25T09:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/preview-story-launch-of-delta-2-rocket-with-nasa-probe-thursday\/"},"modified":"2015-01-25T17:28:06","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T09:28:06","slug":"preview-story-launch-of-delta-2-rocket-with-nasa-probe-thursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/preview-story-launch-of-delta-2-rocket-with-nasa-probe-thursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Preview story: Launch of Delta 2 rocket with NASA probe Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Credit:
Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE \u2014 From weather forecasting to agricultural benefits, a new NASA mission launching this week will provide unprecedented detail, accuracy and coverage of soil moisture from space on a world-wide basis every three days for the next three years.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoist soil is far more interesting than you might have ever imagined,\u201d said Sam Thurman, SMAP deputy project manager.<\/p>\n

\u201cSoil moisture is the bank account of water in the land,\u201d added Dara Entekhabi, SMAP science definition team lead.<\/p>\n

The $916 million Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission is one piece of a larger program of Earth science projects in space to answer questions about how our planet works.<\/p>\n

\u201cSMAP will be joining our 18 operational missions that study the Earth\u2019s systems. These issues that are addressed by this are climate change, things like sea level and fresh water resources. Our on-orbit satellites, along with air and ground observations, monitor the Earth\u2019s vital signs,\u201d said Christine Bonniksen, SMAP program executive with the Science Mission Directorate\u2019s Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters.<\/p>\n

\"1407_\u201cI started out as a planetary science guy, which tended to have a spacecraft and large suite of instruments to go some place and do many different investigations in parallel, in part, because no one may go there again for 10-20-30 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I\u2019ve come to learn in the Earth science program is that the Earth\u2019s climate is particularly complex\u2026It takes a multitude of missions, each capable of dedicated set of measurements, and then scientists build a more comprehensive picture of our planet,\u201d said Thurman.<\/p>\n

In the case of SMAP, the observatory\u2019s focused science goal is mapping global soil moisture content in the top two inches of the ground and determine whether that moisture is liquid or frozen.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the ability to do that on a global basis and with an accuracy that is roughly 10 times greater than what\u2019s achievable with ground-based measurements today,\u201d Thurman said.<\/p>\n

Liftoff is scheduled for the precise moment of 6:20:42 a.m. local time (9:20:42 a.m. EST; 1420:42 GMT) at the opening of a three-minute window on Thursday.<\/p>\n

A United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket will serve as the launch vehicle to deliver SMAP into space. The Delta 2, making its 153rd launching, will fly in a configuration with two stages, three strap-on solid-fuel boosters and a 10-foot composite payload shroud.<\/p>\n

\"preview3\"\u201cThe ULA team is proud to be the launch provider for NASA\u2019s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission,\u201d said Jim Sponnick, vice president of Atlas and Delta Programs.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of four first-tier missions recommended by the National Research Council\u2019s Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space, SMAP will provide global, high- resolution mapping of soil moisture and its freeze\/thaw state to link terrestrial water, energy, and carbon-cycle processes, and to extend capabilities of weather and climate prediction models.\u201d<\/p>\n

It will take 57 minutes and two firings by the upper stage to place SMAP into its preliminary orbit of 411 by 425 miles tilted 98.1 degrees to the equator.<\/p>\n

Also sharing the ride to orbit will be four cubesats as part of NASA\u2019s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites 10 (Elana 10) mission.<\/p>\n

* ExoCube<\/strong>, a space weather satellite developed by California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and sponsored by the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n

* The GEO-CAPE ROIC In-Flight Performance Experiment (GRIFEX<\/strong>), is a technology validation mission developed by the University of Michigan\u2019s Michigan Exploration Laboratory in partnership with NASA\u2019s Earth Science Technology Office and NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.<\/p>\n

* Focused Investigations of Relativistic Electron Burst Intensity, Range, and Dynamics II (FIREBIRD-II A and B<\/strong>), another space weather project, was developed by the University of New Hampshire, Montana State University, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Aerospace Corporation.<\/p>\n

The upper stage will deploy SMAP, then perform an engine burn that lowers the orbital altitude before systematically ejecting the cubesats one hour and 45-48 minutes after launch.<\/p>\n

The upper stage then executes one further burn to deorbit the spent rocket body into the South Pacific.<\/p>\n

The SMAP spacecraft, orbiting at a final science altitude of 426 miles (685 km), will see through moderate vegetation, like a mature Iowa corn field, operating in daylight or darkness, to provide high-resolution maps of moisture in the soil and the state of the ground \u2014 either frozen or thawed \u2014 to give weather forecasters a better base for computer forecasting models.<\/p>\n

\"preview4\"<\/p>\n

Government and commercial users of the data will feed the information into weather forecasting, climate modeling, drought, landslide and flood predictions, agricultural productivity, crop yields and growing season durations, and human health issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll return over 130 gigabytes of data every day. So if you think of a typical Netflix movie as 2-3 gigabytes, we\u2019re doing 50 Netflix movies a day,\u201d said Thurman.<\/p>\n

SMAP is fitted with an active synthetic aperture radar and passive radiometer. It stands 16 feet tall at launch, then blossoms to 32 feet once deployed in orbit. The weight at launch is 2,081 pounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe radiometer provides more accurate soil moisture but a coarse resolution of about 40 kilometers (25 miles) across,\u201d said JPL\u2019s Eni Njoku, a research scientist with SMAP. \u201cWith the radar, you can create very high resolution, but it\u2019s less accurate. To get both an accurate and a high-resolution measurement, we process the two signals together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SMAP_MOBrochure.indd\"\u201cThese two science instruments and mission operations concept are optimized to provide high quality soil moisture data,\u201d said Entekhabi.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe radiometer instrument acts much like a camera. It sees the ambient light environment, in this case beyond the visible range in the microwave range, and the specific advantage of the microwave range is you can see in daylight and at night, you can see through clouds, you can penetrate moderate vegetation and in fact peer into the soil for a few inches to actually measure the volume of water in the soil.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe resolution, the size of the features on the ground that you can see with the radiometer is limited by the size of the antenna, the reflector in this case, and that\u2019s about 40 kilometers for the SMAP radiometer antenna.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn order to augment that, SMAP carries another instrument package, which is the radar. And that one acts like a flash camera, it actually emits light, or in this case a microwave pulse, and looks at the reflection of that off the surface. And much like the flash camera, you can see a lot more detailed features on the surface. But you\u2019re susceptible to scattering off surface vegetation and surface roughness. So it\u2019s less sensitive than the radiometer to soil moisture, but it\u2019s at muchy higher resolution, on the order of 3 kilometers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe combination of these two is what produces the SMAP high quality soil moisture retrievals.\u201d<\/p>\n

The radar and radiometer are like looking through both lenses of bifocals, said Bonniksen. \u201cSMAP\u2026will focus on the water that lives and moves through the soil. This information will improve our knowledge of weather, climate over land as well as water-related hazards,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

SMAP is equipped with a 19.7-foot deployable gold, lightweight, rip-resistant mesh reflector antenna atop a boom structure that spins at 14.6 rpm (one complete rotation every four seconds) and measures the planet in swaths of 620 miles.<\/p>\n

\"preview5\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThe antenna needs to be large in order to have high-resolution, it needs to spin because the antenna is looking off at an angle, and we spin it so that it sweeps out a circle underneath the observatory, which allows us to measure 1,000 km wide swath\u2026to measure the entire globe every 2-3 days,\u201d said Kellogg.<\/p>\n

On Day 16, the boom supporting the antenna will be unstowed and extended into a \u201ctail wagging the dog\u201d configuration. It will take 16 minutes for the 16-foot arm to unfold and lock into place.<\/p>\n

Next, on Day 20, after a few days of monitoring the spacecraft performance in the boom deploy configuration, the antenna itself will be unfurled like a camping chair in a 33-minute procedure.<\/p>\n

The antenna is stowed in a 12-inch-diameter, four-foot-long package for launch. Initially, it is allowed to \u201cbloom\u201d outward to 7-foot in diameter before being driven to the full 20-foot expanse.<\/p>\n