"By helping to clarify the role that Earth's polar regions play in regulating our planet's energy budget, the PREFIRE mission will ultimately help improve climate and ice models," said Amanda Whitehurst, PREFIRE program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
"Improved models will benefit humanity by giving us a better idea of how our climate and weather patterns will change in the coming years."
The PREFIRE mission aims to understand the balance between incoming heat energy from the Sun and the outgoing heat at Earth's poles. The majority of this heat is emitted as far-infrared radiation, influenced by the water vapor content of the atmosphere and the structure and composition of clouds.
The mission will provide data on far-infrared energy radiation from the Arctic and Antarctic. The two CubeSats, in asynchronous near-polar orbits, will study phenomena like cloud formation, moisture changes, and ice sheet melt, and how they affect far-infrared emissions over time.
"Climate change is reshaping our environment and atmosphere in ways that we need to prepare for," said Brian Drouin, PREFIRE's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
"This mission 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."
Each CubeSat carries a thermal infrared spectrometer to measure infrared wavelengths. These instruments, featuring advanced sensors, were miniaturized to fit the CubeSat format.
"Equipped with advanced infrared sensors that are more sensitive than any similar instrument, the PREFIRE CubeSats will help us better understand Earth's polar regions and improve our climate models," said Laurie Leshin, director at NASA JPL.
"Their observations will lead to more accurate predictions about sea level rise, weather patterns, and changes in snow and ice cover, which will help us navigate the challenges of a warming world."
NASA's Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy Space Center, in partnership with NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program, provided the launch service under the agency's Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract.
The PREFIRE mission was jointly developed by NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. NASA JPL manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate and provided the spectrometers. Blue Canyon Technologies built the CubeSats, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will process the data collected. Rocket Lab USA Inc. of Long Beach, California, is the launch services provider.
Related Links
PREFIRE
Beyond the Ice Age
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