European Space Agency launches satellites to assess climate change impact on Earth’s water systems
SMOS over Earth (source: ESA)
On Monday, November 2nd, two satellites were launched into orbit by the ESA or European Space Agency in order to give an overall view of the Earth’s water systems and their patterns. Named the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and Proba-2, the satellites blasted off from Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia. SMOS’s mission is the measuring of ‘water retention capacity in soil to help forecast drought and flood risk and calculate the planet’s carbon cycle to determine the amount of CO2 pollution that affects climate change,’ according to an International Business Times article from November 3rd. The probe will also measure the salinity of sea surface waters, in order to provide more information about global ocean circulation patterns. SMOS should help climatologists understand the long-term effects of climate change.
The much smaller Proba-2’s task is to observe the Sun and its effects on space weather. The probe will test a variety of technological instruments, such as a new lithium-ion battery, as well as measure the ion content in the Earth’s atmosphere, solar flares and solar storms.
According to a similar article by AFP, the SMOS satellite alone cost a cool 315 million euros. No one ever said that the ‘final frontier’ was cheap.
By Graham Land
Additional resources:
European Space Agency web portal – ‘SMOS forms three-pointed star in the sky’
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Tags: climate change, ESA, European Space Agency, Proba-2, SMOS, water
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