Today (May 28) you can watch live as the new Earth-observing mission flies into space.
A Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX carrying the Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer satellite, or EarthCare for short, will lift off today at 6:20 pm EDT (2220 GMT or 3:20 pm local time in California).
Coverage from 5:30 pm EDT (2130 GMT) via the European Space Agency (ESA) on Space.com can be found here. It will launch from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This will be the second launch by SpaceX, which sent its Starlink group of Internet satellites into orbit this morning from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The Falcon 9 first-stage booster that will fly on this mission has already gone into space six times. According to the SpaceX mission description. Its previous missions include the Crew-7 Crew Dragon astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS), the CRS-29 cargo flight to the ISS and two Starlink missions. The booster is scheduled to land again at Vandenberg today, approximately eight minutes later.
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Earthcare is a joint mission between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The mission will „study the role that clouds and aerosols play in reflecting solar radiation back into space and trapping infrared radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface.” According to the ESA.
The ESA added that learning about the solar radiation balance on our planet is „critical to solving climate-related problems, and is something that can only be done from space.”
If all goes according to plan, the mission will operate in an orbit at the altitude of the ISS (250 miles or 400 kilometers), but in a different plane: instead of the ISS’s more equatorial focus, Earthcare will fly by the Sun. A synchronous polar orbit crosses the equator early in the local morning when sunlight is strongest in the region.
The mission is to see how particles of clouds and molecules of aerosols, or suspended particles in the atmosphere, interact with precipitation and how quickly they fall on our planet. Earthcare will also „record the distribution of water droplets and ice crystals and how they are transported in clouds.”
„This essential data improves the accuracy of both cloud development models and their behavior, composition and interaction with aerosols, as well as improving future climate models and supporting numerical weather prediction,” ESA officials added.
The satellite carries four science instruments: atmospheric lidar (a pulsed laser) to study cloud tops and cloud and aerosol profiles; cloud-profiling radar to learn about cloud motion, dynamics and structure; a broadband radiometer to study solar radiation and infrared radiation; and multispectral imager.
Earthcare is expected to have an operational period of six months after launch, and its primary mission will last at least three years. It was previously expected to launch atop a Russian rocket, but mission officials switched to SpaceX after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which severed most space partnerships with that country.