How NASA Tests a New Weather Satellite Using Mules and Sensors

When you plunge a unexampled satellite , how do you get it on for certain that its measuring are precise ? It ’s a circle harder than you ’d remember – andNASA is heading to the Pacific Northwestto do it . Pack animals are postulate .

Last yr , NASA launched a raw satellite calledGPMthat aims to measure snow and rain over the entire globe , every three hour . It ’s next generation technology , but it also needs to be tested – and calibrating a orbiter in blank space is very , very complicated . begin yesterday and cease in December , scientists will habituate the super - rainy , ace - snow-clad , ace - various - in - general Pacific Northwest winter to avail do just that , on a mission calledOlympex .

The first part of the experimentation is comparatively bare , though frighten off : The team is trekking into the wilderness of the Olympic Mountains to fix up and maintain sensing element for precipitation in area that range from light rainfall to passing heavy rainfall to heavy snow . Some of these areas are so removed , they’reusing mule to haul the engineering science into the stack , as KoMo News reports :

There will also be a airplane flying through violent storm cloud above , taking accurate measurements of thing like piddle droplets and ice rink formation – plus radar set up specifically to study swarm geological formation from these remote , showery areas .

University of Washington

All of that will give scientists from NASA and the University of Washington a baseline for how much snow and rain is really fall .

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But what come in next is really fascinating : NASA is , in core , recreate the GPM satellite using ordinary aeroplane . They ’re installing sensors and ironware that are like those onboard the GPM satellite on two dissimilar planes – one flying at 36,000 feet and one flying at 65,000 – to record the kind of datum that the planet would over the Olympic realm . That way , they ’ll have satellite - mode data to compare to the baseline data coming from the reason and the cloud .

The melodic theme is to build a base - in for the satellite here on Earth – and then see just how exact it really is . The projection ’s leader , University of Washington Scientist Bob Houze , put it this way : “ All of these measure are target at determining if the assumptions that we ’re make about interpreting the planet measurement are correct . ”

In a novel video about the project , the scientists describe why they picked the Pacific Northwest : This quoin of the world has an inordinately divers and striking identification number of weather effect , crop from coastal systems to intense rainfall in the mountains :

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The Olympex project is n’t just about calibrate the GPM satellite either : It ’s also go to give these scientists an unprecedented 3D look at the cloud and weather condition blueprint from above and below .

We incline to think of orbiter information as the gold standard . But in reality , it ’s just as fallible – perhaps even moreso – as what any sensors record . To distinguish whether what we see from outer space matches up with what we see from the surface of the Earth is almost as complicated as flummox to place in the first place . We ’ll be watching to find out what Olympex celebrate over the next few month .

Lead image : NASA

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