The first two satellites in a multi-billion-dollar NASA-European project to accurately measure rising sea levels, a major result of global warming, orbited the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from California on Saturday.
By the time it takes for a cloud-infiltrating radar beam to bounce off the ocean 830 miles below, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich satellite can detect sea surfaces with an accuracy of less than half an inch to help scientists chart current global effects. Warm over extended periods.
Named after the late director of NASA’s Earth Sciences Department, “that satellite is so nice we built it twice,” said Josh Willis, a project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Five years from today we will launch its successor, the Sentinel-6B.”
NASA
“Because it means we’ve seen the oceans for a full 10 years in an unbroken record. This is a huge deal for us climate scientists,” he said. “And this is the first time we’ll try to build two in a row so we can start them back yet and go further than we could enable the record so far.”
The satellite’s Falcon 9 rocket took off at 12:17 p.m.
This was California’s 22nd Falcon 9 flight so far this year and is the 103rd overall, including three triple-core Falcon heavy boosters. It was the first Falcon 9 launch since Wendenbar since June 2019.
After running lightning in the lower lower atmosphere, the first phase fell, flipped around, and flew back near the Lunch Pad to chalk up SpaceX’s 66th successful stage recovery, its fourth in California.
In the second phase, meanwhile, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich built two engines to put the satellite into its required orbit.
SpaceX
The Sentinel-6 satellites will continue to be monitored for decades over the past 30 years by NASA, the European Space Agency, the European Organization Exploration MeF meteorological satellites and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
With the launch of the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich and the Sentinel-6B, those standards will be expanded into the 2030s. And the data collected so far is alarming for environmental researchers.
“You can see that the growth rate is really increasing,” Willis said. “So in the 90’s the sea level was rising at about two millimeters per year. In the 2000s, it was about three millimeters per year. And now it’s close to four or five millimeters per year.”
SpaceX
More than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouses is used to heat the world’s oceans.
“So the oceans get warmer, the water expands, that’s about a third of the extra sea surface, the remaining glaciers and ice sheets are melting that are reacting to the warmer atmosphere,” Willis said. “So this mission really gives us our most important door to measure climate change and how it works on Earth.”
In addition to measuring the sea surface around the planet, the new satellite will monitor the temperature and humidity in the lower atmosphere, as well as high-altitude fossils, using a device that measures atmospheric influences on signals transmitted by navigation satellites.
NASA
But the primary mission is monitoring 90 percent of the world’s oceans.
“As our society has evolved, the almost instantaneous combustion of vast reserves of carbon has upset the dynamic balance that existed before the Industrial Revolution,” said Craig Donlon, a project scientist with the European Space Agency.
“We see evidence of this dramatic change in many different criteria … but they all point in the same direction: the earth is warming and this is a great indicator of the earth system imbalance at sea level.”
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