Space X Launches new GRACE for NASA

Near the end of May, SpaceX conducted its tenth launch of the year using the flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket . In that launch, Space X’s Falcon 9 deployed five commercial Iridium communications satellites and the GRACE Follow-On Earth science mission for NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences.

The dual-satellite GRACE Follow-On mission, a partnership between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), is a successor to the GRACE satellites that ceased operations last year after fifteen years of service. In January, NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences announced that a SpaceX Falcon 9 would carry the two GRACE-FO satellites as well as five Iridium Next communications satellites into low earth orbit. Originally, it was expected to launch in early 2018, according to NASA’s fiscal year 2018 budget proposal.

The Grace Follow-On satellites had been booked to fly aboard Dnepr, while Iridium had contracted for launches of the Russian vehicle to carry pairs of its spacecraft into orbit for testing. This was not possible due in part to the political situation with Russia . Iridium and the GFZ – who are responsible for arranging GRACE’s ride to orbit – agreed to share a launch on SpaceX’s more powerful Falcon 9 rocket, splitting the costs.

While similar in design to GRACE, GRACE-FO incorporates lessons learned from 15 years of GRACE operations. The changes made will improve the new mission’s satellite performance and reliability, as well as mission operations. GRACE-FO will also fly a technology demonstration of a new, more precise inter-satellite laser ranging interferometer, developed by a German/U.S. instrument team, for use in future generations of GRACE-like missions.GRACE maps Earth's gravity field by making accurate measurements of the distance between the two satellites, using GPS and a microwave ranging system. This allows scientists all over the world an efficient and accurate way to map Earth's gravity field.

GRACE data has provided a global picture of water storage trends for over a decade and could be an invaluable tool for understanding water resource availability. The GRACE mission is able to monitor monthly water storage changes on the planet. Regardless of whether water is solid, liquid or vapor, visible or invisible, it has mass, which exerts a gravitational pull. By tracking the changing pull of gravity very precisely around Earth, the U.S./German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, mission observed the movement of water around our planet from 2002 to 2017 -- from the top of the Himalayas to the depths of the ocean to deep underground. GRACE Follow-On will continue GRACE’s critical mission of tracking the evolution of Earth’s water cycle by monitoring changes in the distribution of mass on Earth.

Maintaining a consistent, continuous climate data record of water and mass transport in the Earth system over decades is essential to understand and differentiate short-term climate variability from long-term climate change. Because some climate patterns take several decades to unfold, the only way to determine whether a multi-year trend is representative of a long-term change is to extend the length of the observational record. Monitoring changes in ice sheets and glaciers, underground water storage, the amount of water in large lakes and rivers, and changes in sea level provides a unique view of Earth’s evolving climate and its water and energy cycles, with far-reaching societal benefits.

• Tracking mass changes of Earth's polar ice sheets. 
• Estimating global groundwater storage changes. 
• Measuring mass changes caused by large earthquakes. 
• Inferring changes in deep ocean currents, a driving force in climate. 

Curiosity Rover the Mars Mission Update

Curiosity Self Portrait from NASA site

On August 6th 2012 at 1:32 am (eastern time) the rover Curiosity, a large mobile laboratory, was set down on Mars inside the Gale Crater by NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, MSL, beginning a two-year investigation of Mars, the Red Planet. The rover was designed to analyze samples scooped from the soil and drilled from rocks. The record of the planet's climate and geology is essentially "written in the rocks and soil" -- in their formation, structure, and chemical composition and this Mars mission is designed to unveil some of those secrets. The rover's on-board laboratory will study rocks, soils, and the local geologic setting in order to detect forms of carbon, the chemical building blocks of life on Mars. Curiosity carries a radioisotope power system that generates electricity from the heat of plutonium's radioactive decay. This power source gives the mission an operating lifespan on Mars' surface of a full Martian year (687 Earth days) or more and hopefully be able to gather enough data to assess what the Martian environment was like in the past. 

For about three weeks NASA scientists put Curiosity through its paces, testing its equipment and upgrading its software to the exploration software. According to Ben Cichy chief software engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. The flight software for Curiosity was focused on landing the vehicle. It included many capabilities that were no longer needed once Curiosity was down, and contained only basic surface operation capabilities, so the software was upgraded. Once the Curiosity rover was checked out and ready to go the rover began it eastward trek toward Mount Sharp, a mountain about 3 miles (5 kilometers) tall. The rover is conducting experiments along the way, seeking clues in the rocks and soil that would indicate whether Mars ever was capable of supporting microbial life. It is taking and sharing pictures of the trip and using the Foursquare application.

The first Martian rock NASA's Curiosity rover investigated was found to be a close match in chemical composition to an unusual but well-known type of igneous rock found in many volcanic provinces on Earth according to Edward Stolper of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., who is working with the Curiosity team. On Earth, rocks with this composition typically come from the planet's mantle beneath the crust, from crystallization of relatively water-rich magma at elevated pressure and hints of a Mars past when there was water on the plant.

A set of instruments aboard the have analyzed samples of the atmosphere collected near the "Rocknest" site in Gale Crater where the rover stopped for research. Findings from the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments found  an increase of 5 %  in heavier isotopes of carbon in the atmospheric carbon dioxide compared to scientists’ estimates of the isotopic ratios present when Mars formed. These enriched ratios of heavier isotopes to lighter ones suggest the top of the atmosphere may have been lost to interplanetary space. Losses at the top of the atmosphere would deplete lighter isotopes. Isotopes of argon also show enrichment of the heavy isotope, matching previous estimates of atmosphere composition derived from studies of Martian meteorites on Earth. 

Scientists theorize that in Mars' distant past its environment may have been quite different, with persistent water and a thicker atmosphere. NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission will investigate possible losses from the upper atmosphere when it arrives at Mars in 2014. The Opportunity rover that landed in 2004 is still operational in the southern hemisphere of Mars. The Spirit rover also landed in 2004 stopped communicating with NASA in 2010. Previous work on Mars found water carved channels and sediments that was once carried by water to form fans and deltas within lake basins. Recent small craters discovered by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter expose buried ice in the middle latitudes of Mars. This ice is a record of past climate change. Not stable today, it was deposited during a period of different obliquity, or tilt, of the planet's axis. 

So far Curiosity has traveled 0.42 mile (677 meters) since Curiosity's landing stopping ever few meters to take samples and test rocks. The Curiosity rover is parked for the holidays but continues testing the Martian environment from its holiday location within Yellowknife Bay. The mission's plans for most of 2013 center on driving toward the primary mission destination, the 3-mile-high (5-kilometer) layered mound we are calling Mount Sharp to determine if areas within the Gale Crater and specifically Mount Sharp ever were a habitable environment for microbes. The mission, like all the Mars missions is slow going.  It is now expected that the trek to Mount Sharp will not begin until end of January or early February. 

Sun Spots, Solar Minimum and Climate Change

After a period of increased activity during the 20th century, the sun now appears to be in an extended solar minimum. Three teams of scientists presented their results on June 14, 2011 at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Solar Physics division in New Mexico that all indicate an extended period of low solar activity.

The evidence “all indicates that the next solar cycle will be delayed and the sun is headed into a quiet period”, said Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory. According to space weather scientist Bruce Tsurutani at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a solar minimum is defined by sunspot number and 2008 was identified as the period of solar minimum. However, the solar geomagnetic effects on Earth did not reach their minimum until 2009. It was expected that solar activity would begin to build again by this time in preparation for the next cycle and next solar maximum, but the sun remains clear of sun spots. The sun has been unusually quite for four years and scientists do not know how long the decline in solar energy may last.

Every 22 years, the sun's magnetic field switches north and south, creating an 11-year sunspot cycle. Jet streams on the sun's surface and below are early indicators of solar storm activity, and the jet streams have not formed yet for the 2020 cycle. According to Dr. Hill that indicates that there will be little or delayed activity in that cycle. The length of the delay is not known. In recorded history there have been three episodes where the regular 11-year solar cycle has not occurred and these correlated to cool periods on Earth 1650, 1770, and 1850.

Now solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, if solar activity falls. No sunspots were visible for a 70-year period starting in 1645, known as the Maunder Minimum. The Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling, occurred along with the Maunder Minimum after the Medieval Climate Optimum, a global warming period. Several causes have been proposed for the Little Ice Age: an extended period of low solar activity, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the circulation patterns of the oceans, an inherent variability in global climate, or decreases in the human population. The earth is such a complicated system with so many inputs and dependent cycles that an accurate model has not been developed and is unlikely to be developed to test these theories.

Climate scientists on the other hand believe that an extended solar minimum will have imperceptible impact on their global warming forecasts. Nigel Calder co-author of “The Chilling Stars, A new theory of climate change” is a believer in the Solar Irradiance theory and feels that the effects of greenhouse gases are likely to be a good deal less than advertised based on a different theory of climate change. Mr. Calder believes that climate is dependent on solar radiation and that climate models do not account for solar impact.

The best measurements of global air temperatures come from our weather satellites, and they reportedly show fluctuations, but no overall change in air temperature since 1999. (Though record warm and cold years have been recorded since that time the average seems to be the same.) The leveling off of global warming as measured by air temperature while CO2 levels continue to increase is heralded by the school of thought, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do.

Solar cosmic rays intensity and frequency affect the production rate of radiocarbon, C14. This is the substance that is used by archaeologists to date objects. The original C14 content is due to the amount present in the air at the time of death or encapsulation. The atoms gradually decay back to nitrogen and thus provide a method for dating materials. It was discovered in 1958 by Hessel de Vries of Gronigen that the rate of C14 production varies. The C14 variations allowed the variation in the solar production of cosmic rays to be measured. Roger Bray of the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research then Jack Eddy of High Altitude Observatory in Colorado documented the correlation of solar cosmic rays and the earth’s climate changes.

There is more than one theory of climate change and I certainly do not know the true importance of the factors that can impact global temperature change, but I am unwilling to dismiss any theory or area of investigation at this stage. The world is not black and white and our knowledge of the interlacing systems that make up the ecosystems of the earth is truly limited. The real world is the one that is subtly interconnected where we have limited knowledge and understanding. If this extended solar minimum occurs it will likely be possible to determine the impact of solar radiation and sun spots on climate and global temperatures.