GPM Launch and Deploy Animation

LEAD: NASA launches a new weather satellite from Japan today.1. US and Japan are partners.GPM: Global Precipitation Measurement Will circle Earth every 90 minutes.Will be the core of a constellation of satellites.2. Instruments will take “cat scans” of storms from 250 miles above the earth.3. For the first time from space a “dual-frequency radar" will be able to measure snow as well as rain.TAG: Rainfall measurements every 3 hours will help future forecasters issue warnings for flooding, such as the record Colorado flood of Sept. 2013 with over 10 inches of rain. Related pages

GPM Constellation with clock GPM Constellation without clock Nine U.S. and international satellites will soon be united by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, a partnership co-led by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). NASA and JAXA will provide the GPM Core satellite to serve as a reference for precipitation measurements made by this constellation of satellites, which will be combined into a single global dataset continually refreshed every three hours. While each partner satellite has its own mission objective, they all carry a type of instrument called a radiometer that measures radiated energy from rainfall and snowfall. The GPM Core satellite carries two instruments: a state-of-the-art radiometer called the GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) and the first space-borne Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR), which sees the 3D structure of falling rain and snow. The DPR and GMI work in concert to provide a unique database that will be used to improve the accuracy and consistency of measurements from all partner satellites, which will then be combined into the uniform global precipitation dataset. In this animation the orbit paths of the partner satellites of the GPM constellation fill in blue as the instruments pass over Earth. Rainfall appears light blue for light rain, yellow for moderate, and red for heavy rain. Partner satellites are traced in green and purple, and the GPM Core is traced in red. The GPM Core observatory is currently being built and tested at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It is scheduled to launch from Tanegashima space center in Japan in early 2014. Related pages