This has been a long time in coming.
You know, we're having this conversation after 21, 22 years
of thinking about this.
Your eyes are burning and you smell it.
If there’s dead fish around.
Your day goes from being high
aspirations and catching lots of fish to well, we're not going fishing today.
There's nothing to catch, I don’t have bait.
Can't get through the red tide.
Everything's dead.
Red tide is a nightmare.
Red tide is a problem for fishermen.
It's a problem for people with respiratory issues that live on the beach.
It's a problem for people that go to the beach to get their zen time.
Just problematic.
The red tide when it's bad, you just can't really get away from it.
I mean and if the sea and the oceans are dead.
What are we going to eat?
I've never been more excited
about the possibility of discovery.
I have 100% confidence
that what we're going to produce from PACE will surpass
all of our wildest dreams.
This is going to change the world.
First red tide
I remember was back in the mid 80s.
Don't remember much before that being all that bad.
But in the 80s, there I was driving test boats at the Mercury facility.
And I was in a little slow boat,
and the dead fish of all species
were floating on top of the water. And,
that was one of the first ones and one of the worst ones I can remember.
I remember
just people complaining on the beach.
No it's a bad deal.
What we normally do is we we run off shore and catch
grouper and snapper on a private boat that I run.
clients would arrive between seven, 8:00.
We run offshore, we fish all day, try to get back to the dock by four
because we aspire to have an outstanding catch every day,
which means spending time at the fish cleaning table.
So you get home exhausted.
You're tired.
It's. It's 12 hour day, no matter what.
I mean, it's
it's, it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding.
Well, it's my life and it's everything.
And we live in Florida.
People come here to go on the water, catch fish and enjoy the beaches.
And that's not happening when there's red tide and death
all over the beach.
We're lucky right now.
We don't have the red tide, but it runs people off.
I would like to think we could prevent red tide from happening,
but that's almost
like trying to keep cancer from happening.
It's a tough one.
You never know where it's going to pop up.
I hope and pray that we can do
something to turn us around here, because it’s terrible,
absolutely terrible.
And, hopefully NASA, can get something going
there.
The red tide can be so intense
right along the beach that really no one is on the beach.
That's further magnified if the red tide is also
causing low oxygen levels and caused, fish kills.
And so when you have, 80 pound,
120 pound grouper or manatee, dead on the beach, rotting,
you now have, biomass, you have rotting animals.
And that ammonia smell of rotting animals,
and rotting mammals and fish on the beach.
The combination can truly make the beach just,
not tolerable for anyone.
Since I've worked here, we had a period of about 18 months
where red tide was on and off nonstop.
It pretty much shut down the island.
We had a large influx of patients.
It was pretty much a daily occurrence.
Somebody calling with a respiratory problem.
We have a hard time telling people
to limit your exposure.
So it isolated a lot of people at that time.
I think that the more data we have and the more science,
and the more funding we can direct towards science to better understand
red tide, then the more likely we are to be able to mitigate and take steps
to at least make some measurement of improvement in controlling,
predicting when it's going to be bad, but also controlling just how bad it is
and lessening the suffering not only of us, but also of our marine friends.
So you have to elevate your senses all the way into space.
So only from a satellite point of view do you get this
beautiful synoptic, picture of our home planet.
And if you weren't able to do that, there would be so many parts
of the role of phytoplankton that just would otherwise be invisible.
Most people don't realize this, but
NASA plays a foundational role
in the entire international study
of Earth science.
So I knew that
I wanted to be involved in marine science,
since eighth grade.
And I was lucky enough at the time, the public school that I attended in
Central Connecticut had a program that brought me
to the biological station for research in Bermuda.
And that was a transformative moment.
And it's not just learning how the satellite system
relates to the oceanography I was already interested in, but,
good grief,
I mean, the greatest collection of Earth scientists in the country reside here.
Well, all right, so the ocean
provides it, you know, provides a food source.
It helps regulate weather and climate.
There are compounds from the ocean that make medicines and jobs economy.
All of that ties back to what is in the ocean.
And so from a phytoplankton point of view, you have the beneficial ones
that feed fisheries, the beneficial ones that are moving carbon around
and influencing climate.
There are also the harmful ones.
Some of these are harmful enough that these phytoplankton could kill you
and they're the ones that form red tides,
where you're seeing beach closures or oyster farms
suddenly having to be closed because of contamination.
They carry this particular chemical that tends to be an irritant
to humans and animals or create an odor and so forth.
It's not enough just to say I see phytoplankton there.
You know, if you're sitting on the West Florida shelf, for example,
and you see a bloom of phytoplankton from space, it's important to know
whether it's a red tide that might have some severe impact to that
coastal community, versus it just happens to be a lot of phytoplankton
there.
Some of these form
in places like the, the Great Lakes.
And there was an instance not long ago where a cyanotoxin bloom,
shut down the water intake to the city of Toledo.
And this is happening on more diverse
areas, places where they weren't happening before.
Sometimes they're happening with more frequency.
Anyway.
Point is, is that we want to monitor them,
and that's where PACE comes in.
We have been doing ocean
color from space and atmospheric work from space for over 40 years.
And we have this beautiful fleet at NASA and with our international partners,
that really have formed the foundation for what
PACE Observatory is going to be. And
they're wonderful at
doing their job, which was or is to separate
a signal from phytoplankton from everything else in the water column.
But what they don't do well is
tell you what is contributing
to that biomass, what community is actually there.
And that's because, they use ocean color, but they're only looking at 7
or 8 colors of the rainbow.
And they do that by having measurements of several blue bands,
several green bands, and several red bands.
But that's still eight crayons in your box.
If you wanted to actually see the subtleties
and different greens and different blues, you need more color.
PACE is full spectrum, full rainbow from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared.
So you would imagine this as being handed a box of 200 crayons.
And if I asked you to paint, sorry, color the most spectacular landscape
you could, which box are you gonna choose?
You want all the color, you don’t want some of the colors.
So the information content for any singular
instrument on PACE is way more than we're used to.
This is such a cool problem to have.
So suddenly the tools you have at your fingertips
will fill in all the gaps of color that we could possibly want.
We know the atmosphere is changing
every time a pattern in agriculture changes,
you know, is there something that's altering nutrient availability
to your local marine ecosystem that is suddenly changing how things are growing?
You may be noticing in your backyard if you have a small body of water,
why are these scums of algae forming that weren't there a few years ago?
And then they disappear and the timings are changing.
We know carbon dioxide levels
have increased over the past 200 years.
We know that has warmed our atmosphere.
A warming atmosphere,
the physics behind it are starting to change how our oceans behave.
Circulation patterns are changing.
Places are warmer than they used to be.
Currents are evolving
to bring nutrients to places they once were not.
In many ways, you know you you wish you would have had these eyes
in the sky forever because you know that information is so powerful.
So there's a lot of benefit from an instrument like OCI,
where you can reveal phytoplankton features and algae features
that you just can't see with the instruments that we have in orbit now.
It is going to provide really a quantum leap
in the knowledge base
that we have, it's going to change our foundational knowledge of things.
And we are going to stumble into new discoveries
that, you know, I can't predict.
The economy is tied to it
now, not just coastal economies, but it's easy to think of it in a coastal way.
You know that there are fishermen,
there are shell fishermen, there's recreation associated with this.
So if you enjoy, you know, eating
or you enjoy going to the beach or being out on the water, phytoplankton
play a big role in your life, whether you know it or not.
So the scientific community, which is inclusive of partners like NOAA, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency
and other organizations like that that do watershed management
or have some responsibility for safe and clean drinking water.
They spend a lot of time thinking about, the frequency,
the duration and the extent of these harmful algal blooms.
and I've been involved in a project, actually, that's really fascinating
about using satellite data
as a tool to start looking at longer term time series of these.
So I don't know that anybody was specifically predicting a boom
or bust of them over time, but they certainly are important enough,
and resources to monitor them are scarce enough
that using satellite information to start studying harmful
algal blooms has been really, really, popular and,
becoming more of the forefront of that field, at least from a
management point of view over
the past ten years or so.
And so the real origin of the PACE mission
is circa 1999
2000. where SeaWiFS was flying and successful.
MODIS Terra had just launched.
And at that point the ocean color community
had a whole new playbook for their research.
And those missions are so successful, the scientific community
really started diving into, well, if we had to do this again,
what happens now and what does that look like?
And that evolved into a series of studies conducted at Goddard
and elsewhere with collaborators from all over the country.
And the genesis of the idea
became a little bit more real.
It would be so profound
to have a new ability to look at this blue marble.
You know, we're all citizens of Earth.
Why don't we want to be watching it every day from space?
Now we are
10.5 hours from launch.
The deeper dive we take into the relationships
between land, ocean, and atmosphere, the more realize we don't know
and we need to learn.
It's going to revolutionize and allow us to take
this huge volume of information that we've never had before.
And actually dissect it and integrate it in really, really interesting ways.
We're going to start learning
causes and effects or just interactions,
and how different parts of the ecosystem start piecing
together.
So I can say
without hesitation that the new data coming out of PACE from all three of its
instruments is going to absolutely change the way we view our home planet.
And what will come with that is a deeper understanding of how all the systems
connect, why things are happening, why decisions we might make
could influence other things downstream
in the grand sense of how everything fits together.
Ten. Nine.
Eight. Seven. Six.
Five. Four.
Three. Two. One.
Booster ignition.
Full power engines and liftoff of the Falcon
Nine and PACE.
1.7 billion pounds of thrust.
Come on girl!
Looking inside.
There go the fairings.