So, my heart is definitely racing. I don’t know about anyone else’s.
This is the stuff nerds dream of.
Ten seconds
Nine
Eight
Seven
Six
- It’s gonna happen!-
Four
Three
Two
NASA Explorers
Cryosphere
Episode Nine: Final Approach
That countdown you just heard?
We’ll get back to that in a minute.
Last episode, we saw the epic launch of ICESat-2, NASA’s newest state-of-the-art ice-observing satellite.
But now that it’s in orbit, the pressure to deliver results in on.
Between launch and the first ground returns, it took seventeen or eighteen days or something like this.
You know, it’s a time when you’re quite nervous.
Nine years ago, Dr. Thorsten Markus took over as the Lead Project Scientist
for ICESat-2 during a time when the mission needed a champion.
You start fighting for a mission, for over - for nine years now.
So, when ICESat-2 was turned on for the first time, eighteen days after it was launched,
only then would the science team know if the whole thing had worked. And it did
First of all, it’s kind of emotional being here.
ICESat-2 was in development for nine, ten years
and, you know, as a project scientist, you live a mission, right?
If it sounds like there’s a lot of noise in the background,
that’s because Thorsten is being interviewed from a plane 1,500 feet in the air.
IceBridge was tasked with the job of bridging the data between the end of ICESat’s mission
and the beginning of ICESat-2 – about a nine-year difference.
The goal is that it would run until ICESat-2 launched, and then have overlap with ICESat-2 as well
so we can get a really long, well calibrated time series from IceBridge.
As the Deputy Project Scientist for Operation IceBridge,
Brooke works closely with Thorsten to make sure the two missions are syncing up.
The timing was everything during that mission, which was a real challenge, because not only….
Basically, what you need to take away is getting an airplane and a satellite in space
to fly over the same flight path at the same time and collect matching data is really, really hard
IceBridge was tasked with two objectives:
Check the accuracy of ICESat-2’s data over land ice and over sea ice.
They were able to lock in the land ice data fairly early in the mission. But the sea ice data…
It was really tricky. We waited day after day.
Do we fly the sea ice? It’s still on our list.
Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Mark on the overpass! Zero four three five three five zulu.
Here’s what just happened:
A plane 1,500 feet up and a satellite 308 miles up measured the same sea ice at the same time
This moment finally linked veteran mission Operation IceBridge’s data to that of its new sister mission, ICESat-2
- two projects that, until now, were separate for nearly ten years.
It’s a very satisfying feeling, because you do something that is meaningful in the bigger picture.
And yeah, that’s very satisfying.
Our search for knowledge doesn’t end here.
GRACE-FO and ICESat-2, the two satellite missions that launched this year,
will continue to bring in incredible data for the foreseeable future.
The steady drumbeat of campaigns in the field goes on.
But most of all, the people who look for answers will never stop searching.
And from our perspective, it’s pretty clear why:
What is your favorite planet in the solar system?
My favorite planet is Earth.
What? Earth…Really?
The Earth! Obviously.
My favorite planet in the solar system?
Earth! Right? We live on it. It’s a really important one.
My favorite planet is Earth!
Yeah, so -
Why?
When you look out at the other planets, they’re absolutely fascinating.
They’ve got all sorts of interesting systems going on. They’ve got dust storms.
But then when you’re on another planet looking back at Earth, I mean, it’s just incredible.
Whenever you go in different places, it looks so different, so amazing, it’s just…I love the planet Earth.
It’s just a very special planet. This is our home.
We’ve seen things far beyond the solar system.
But even with all that, even with the amazing things we’ve seen, one of the most amazing is the Earth itself.
It’s gotta be Earth.
It’s gotta be here. I like the polar regions of here.
Of Earth. Yeah, sorry. It’s very boring.
Earth is good.
We live here. It sustains our life.
I’m not going to turn my back on it.
[Laughing]
It’s got water, it’s got ice, it’s got vegetation.
I mean it’s just, it’s rich with life. And so studying Earth is a very, very rewarding career.
And I think if we were on any other planet, we’d be trying to get to Earth as quickly as we could.
Cryosphere