“You look up every day and the sun is there; it looks pretty much the same,” said Szabo in a small conference room located deep within the NASA Goddard Center complex in Greenbelt, Maryland. “In reality it varies quite a bit.”
Szabo has been working on the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite, or DSCOVR, with a sense of urgency as the launch, scheduled for this Sunday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, nears. He will travel down to the site for the big day, where he will have to divide his attention between focusing on the launch and engaging VIP attendees such as a Congressional delegation and former Vice President Al Gore, a long-time proponent of the project.
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A joint effort between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force, the DSCOVR will both monitor space weather to help assess its impact on Earth’s magnetic field, as well as provide valuable earth science measurements that will greatly contribute to understanding earth science, including climate change.
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When it comes to climate science, Szabo was most excited about the NIST Advanced Radiometer (NISTAR), which in simple terms “takes a single pixel image of the Earth.” Whatever light goes into this very precisely-calculated instrument will be stuck, unable to escape. This trapped light will provide a measurement of energy, and will help determine the Earth’s “radiation budget’: i.e. if the Earth’s atmosphere is retaining more or less solar energy than it radiates back to space. If Earth keeps in more solar energy than it loses, then it will warm.
Readings from NISTAR will provide another critical data point to be incorporated into climate models in an effort to better predict how human contributions to greenhouse gasses are disrupting the natural state of the biosphere.
Read more at A Sneak Peek at NASA’s New Satellite that Has Been 16 Years in the Making
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