SpaceX launches NASA-European satellite to monitor sea level rise

The first of two satellites in a billion-dollar European NASA project to accurately measure sea-level rise, a major consequence of global warming, entered orbit from California on Saturday atop a SpaceX Falcon rocket. 9.

By calculating the time it takes for radar beams penetrating clouds to bounce off the ocean 830 miles below, the Michael Freilich Sentinel-6 satellite can track sea levels with less than half an inch accuracy to help scientists track the effects. ongoing global warming for prolonged periods.

Named after the late director of NASA’s Division of Earth Sciences, “it’s so beautiful we built it twice,” said project scientist Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “In five years we will launch its successor, Sentinel-6B.”

“This is a big deal for us climate scientists, because it means we can look at the oceans for 10 full years in an unbroken record,” he said. “And it’s the first time we’ve been able to build two in a row so that we can throw them one after the other and extend the record much further than we have been able to do so far.”

The satellite’s Falcon 9 rocket came to life at 12:17 p.m. ET and departed from the 4-East Launch Complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles, climbing south to a 66 inclined orbit. degrees with respect to the equator.

It was the California rocket builder’s 22nd Falcon 9 flight so far this year and its 103rd total, including three three-core Falcon Heavy repeaters. It was the first Falcon 9 launched by Vandenber since June 2019.

After passing through the dense lower atmosphere, the first stage crashed, capsized, and flew back to a landing near the launch pad to mark SpaceX’s 66th successful recovery, its fourth in California.

The second phase, meanwhile, carried out two engine starts to put the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite in the required orbit.

The Sentinel-6 satellites will continue a decade-long effort by NASA, the European Space Agency, the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor sea levels over the past 30 years.

With the launch of Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich and Sentinel-6B, these measurements will be extended to the 1930s. And the data collected so far is alarming for climate researchers.

“You can see that the rate of increase is actually increasing,” Willis said. “So in the 1990s, sea level was rising about two millimeters per year. In the 2000s, it was more like three millimeters per year. And now it’s more like four or nearly five millimeters per year.” .

More than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse goes to warm the world’s oceans.

“So the oceans warm up, the water expands, about a third of sea level rise, the rest comes from melting glaciers and ice caps that react to warming the environment,” Willis said. “So these missions really give us our most important metric for measuring climate change and how it’s developing on the planet.”

In addition to measuring sea levels around the planet, the new satellite will also monitor temperature and humidity in the lower atmosphere and the high-altitude stratosphere using an instrument that measures atmospheric effects on signals transmitted by navigation satellites.

But the main mission is to monitor sea levels in 90% of the world’s oceans.

“The dynamic equilibrium that persisted before the industrial revolution was upset by the almost instantaneous combustion of huge carbon reserves as our society developed,” said Craig Donlon, project scientist at the European Space Agency.

“We see evidence of this dramatic change in many different measurements … but they all point in the same direction: the Earth is warming. And the biggest indicator of this Earth system imbalance is sea level rise.”