PACE Makes the Invisible Visible

Narration: Ryan Fitzgibbons

Transcript:

VO

Decades in the making and launched mere months ago, the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud and ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, is giving us a first glimpse at promising new data from the sea and sky.

JEREMY

It’s a mission is exciting because PACE makes the invisible visible. It’s flying hundreds of miles above Earth and yet it’s designed to see microscopic things.

VO

PACE is seeing the ocean like no other mission has before. While previous ocean color satellites could only detect a handful of wavelengths [of light], PACE is detecting more than 200 wavelengths. And more wavelengths mean more pigments.

JEREMY

Tiny organisms called phytoplankton contain green pigments that allow them to photosynthesize, which is really important if you care about breathing and eating. But their pigments contain many, many shades of green, and that contains a ton of information.

VO

The more information revealed by PACE’s hyperspectral Ocean Color Instrument, the more details that emerge from our changing ocean and coastal communities. Like how one group of phytoplankton can dominate a particular area.

IVONA

You can kind of see that in chlorophyll, you see that in chlorophyll, that pigment, but once it starts popping up with this view that PACE allows us, with all this different phytoplankton, once again you see so many miniature teeny tiny features that are maybe not that important physically but they’re important enough for one type of phytoplankton win. One type of phytoplankton be dominant over another.

JEREMY

And you care about this because not every community is the same. Some are beneficial, they provide food and oxygen. Others close beaches. So we really want to know where they are and when they appear and what the impact of all this is.

VO

PACE is also giving us an early look into aerosols, microscopic atmospheric particles like dust, sea salt, pollen and volcanic ash. The two polarimeter instruments onboard measure the light bouncing off the particles at many different angles.

KIRK

This scene represents observations at a number of different geometries as the spacecraft flies over. So it’s about five minutes elapses between the first observation at one angle and the last observation looking in a backwards direction.

VO

Moving through the different angles reveals the Sun glint reflecting off the ocean surface. Analyzing the geometry of that Sun glint gives us more details about that environment.

KIRK

If you want to observe the ocean itself, inside the ocean body, you can’t do it when you see the Sun glint reflecting off like that. So having lots of different viewing angles allows you to see geometries where you can see what’s happening in the body of the ocean.

MENG

That’s only the surface. We need to understand why. Where did the color come from? What is inside the atmosphere? And what is inside the water? There’s a deep meaning of those stuff. In order to really understand that, we need more information.

JEREMY

I cannot wait to be on the far end of launch with data flowing and just absorbing what the community comes out with because I think we’re all going to be surprised and really, really pleased.