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Space agencies across the planet launch the most ambitious plan yet to understand how the world’s water works. The GPM Core satellite launches from Japan on Thursday, February 27. Bill Ingalls/NASA. Late last week, from a launch pad at the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, a rocket shot toward space. Nestled inside it was an amalgam of solar arrays and communications equipment and propulsion instruments, all of them cobbled together in the utilitarian-chic manner favored by aerospace engineers—one more satellite for the growing constellation of man-made objects sent to orbit, and observe, the Earth. NASA calls this latest satellite the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory. I propose we call it, to make things simpler for ourselves, “Core.” Core is, technically, a weather satellite, built to observe the workings of the Earth from beyond its bounds. But it’s more complex than a traditional satellite: Core gets its name from the fact that it is the central unit in a network of nine satellites studded across the exterior perimeter of the Earth, contributed to the cause by various countries and space agencies. Their job? To analyze the planet’s water, from beyond the planet. The Global Precipitation Measurement project, with Core as its central piece of orbiting infrastructure, will provide observations of the world’s snowfall and rainfall and cloud patterns, across a network, at three-hour intervals. Read the rest at The Atlantic.
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A World of Water, Seen From Space
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