SpaceX launches NASA’s European satellite to monitor sea level rise

The first of two satellites in a NASA billion-dollar European project to accurately measure sea level rise, a major consequence of global warming, entered orbit from California on Saturday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

By measuring the time it takes for radar beams that penetrate the clouds to recover from the ocean 830 miles below, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite can track sea levels with an accuracy of less than half an inch to help scientists chart the continuing effects of globalization. heating for long periods.

Named after the late director of NASA’s Earth Sciences Division, “it’s such a beautiful satellite that we built it twice,” said project scientist Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “In five years we will launch its successor, Sentinel-6B.”

“This is very important to us climate scientists, because it means we can observe the oceans for a full 10 years in an unbroken record,” he said. “And it is the first time that we have been able to build two in a row so that we can launch them one after the other and extend the record far beyond what we have been able to do so far.”

The satellite’s Falcon 9 rocket came to life at 12:17 p.m. ET and flew away from the 4-East launch complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles, climbing southward into an orbit inclined 66 degrees toward the equator.

It was the California rocket builder’s 22nd Falcon 9 flight so far this year and the 103rd overall, including three triple-core Falcon Heavy thrusters. It was the first release of Vandenber’s Falcon 9 since June 2019.

After traversing the dense lower atmosphere, the first stage detached, flipped and flew back to a landing near the launch pad to mark SpaceX’s 66th successful stage recovery, the fourth in California.

Meanwhile, the second stage carried out two rounds of engines to put the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite into its required orbit.

The Sentinel-6 satellites will continue a decades-long effort by NASA, the European Space Agency, the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor sea levels over the past 30 years.

With the launch of Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich and Sentinel-6B, those measurements will extend into the 2030s. And the data collected so far is alarming to climate researchers.

“You can see that the rate of increase is actually increasing,” Willis said. “So in the 1990s, the sea level was going up about two millimeters a year. In the 2000s, it was more like three millimeters a year. And now it’s more like four or close to five millimeters a year.”

More than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse effect goes to warm the world’s oceans.

“So the oceans are warming, the water is expanding, that’s about a third of the rise in sea level, the rest is from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets that are reacting to the warming of the environment,” he said Willis. “So these missions really give us our most important yardstick for measuring climate change and how it’s unfolding on the planet.”

In addition to measuring sea levels across the planet, the new satellite will also monitor temperature and humidity in the lower atmosphere, as well as in the higher-altitude stratosphere, using an instrument that measures atmospheric effects on signals transmitted by the navigation satellites.

But the main mission is to monitor sea levels in 90 percent of the world’s oceans.

“The dynamic equilibrium that persisted before the industrial revolution has been disrupted by the almost instantaneous burning of huge carbon stocks as our society has developed,” said Craig Donlon, project scientist at the European Space Agency.

“We see evidence of this dramatic change in many different measures … but they all point in the same direction: Earth is warming. And the biggest indicator of this imbalance in the Earth system is rising sea levels.”