NASA has more eyes in the skies after the launch on Saturday of its Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) mission. One of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket place the satellites into orbit from the launch facility in New Zealand.
The pair of CubeSats will spend 10 months monitoring the two poles of the Earth and help NASA to better better predict changes to the climate based on changes in the Earth’s ice, seas, and weather.
Tristan L’Ecuyer, PREFIRE’s principal investigator at thebUniversity of Wisconsin in Madison stated:
Our planet is changing quickly, and in places like the Arctic, in ways that people have never experienced before…NASA’s PREFIRE will give us new measurements of the far-infrared wavelengths being emitted from Earth’s poles, which we can use to improve climate and weather models and help people around the world deal with the consequences of climate change.
The name of the mission, PREFIRE, is a little scary given the fires throughout the world said to be associated with climate change. Sadly, we are far from pre-fire and more like mid-fire. We can only hope that better information from the satellites can help us to steer a safer path.
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