EarthCARE stands for Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer, and the satellite – created by the European Space Agency (ESA) – carries a set of four instruments that work together to study the role that clouds and aerosols play in reflecting incident solar radiation back out to space and trapping infrared radiation emitted from Earth’s surface.
The four instruments are: an atmospheric lidar (to measure the vertical profile of aerosols and clouds in Earth’s atmosphere along the EarthCARE track), a cloud profiling radar (operating in the millimetre-wavelength range to study the formation and dissipation of clouds for climate models), a multispectral imager (providing a wider field of view to give context to the profile measurements) and the Broadband radiometer (viewing the atmosphere from three directions to quantify the amount of reflected solar radiation and the outgoing thermal radiation emitted by Earth).
“Although clouds and aerosols play an extremely important role in atmospheric heating and cooling, they remain a relative mystery – in fact, clouds are the least understood factor in our understanding of how the atmosphere drives the climate system,” writes the agency.
EarthCARE
EarthCARE is actually a joint venture between ESA and JAXA and pictured below is the Mission Control GO team for the EarthCARE launch.
“I’d like to congratulate everyone who has worked so hard to get us to this point, including our Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, and our industrial partners,” said ESA’s EarthCARE Project Manager, Dirk Bernaerts.
“It was an emotional moment for those of us here in Vandenberg who were able to bid farewell to our precious satellite while we watched it being encapsulated within the two-halves of the rocket fairing, as it will never be ‘seen’ again by human eyes. Of course, our real good-byes will come when we see EarthCARE take to the skies.”
EarthCARE will be launched imminently from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (29 May at 00:20 CEST, in California, but today 28 May, 15:20 in Europe). You can watch a stream of the launch below.
Image: SpaceX
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Alun Williams
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