NASA and France are preparing to launch a new satellite next month to
map Earth's rising sea levels and study their link to global climate change.
The Jason 2 spacecraft is set to lift off atop a Delta 2 rocket on June
15 from Vandenberg Air Force in California on a joint mission to study the
Earth's oceans and their currents.
"Globally, on average, sea levels are rising," said Steven Neek of NASA's
Science Mission Directorate at NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters, in a
Tuesday briefing. "This is a complex phenomenon which we need to understand
better through flying new spacecraft."
Since 1993, global sea levels have risen about 0.12 inches (3 millimeters)
per year, or about twice the expected rate based on tide records from the past
century, NASA officials said. Natural and human-made causes are responsible for
the shift, Neek said.
Jason 2's Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM) is a joint NASA-French
Space Agency effort and the third in a series of satellites to track global sea
levels for
climate studies. The spacecraft's immediate predecessor, Jason 1, launched
in 2001 and is still operating today. Another U.S.-French satellite, TOPEX/Poseidon,
launched in 1992 and scanned
Earth's oceans for 13 years.
"OSTM/Jason
2 will help create the first multi-decadal global record for understanding the
vital roles of the ocean in climate change," said Lee-Lueng Fu, the
mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
Calif., in a statement.
The new
$433 million spacecraft is expected to orbit in tandem with Jason 1 some 830
miles (1,336 km) above Earth and double the amount of monitoring coverage of
Earth's oceans, mission managers said.
The
satellite uses ocean altimetry and other tools to measure the height of the sea
surface with an accuracy of within 1.3 inches (3.3 cm). The readings are also
expected to yield information on the speed and direction of ocean currents, and
serve as an indicator of the amount of heat in the water that can affect
climate change, mission researchers said.
In addition
to NASA and the French Space Agency, the Jason 2 mission also includes
participants at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and
the 20-nation weather satellite organization EUMETSAT. Researchers hope that by tying
Jason 2 data into the international forecasting agencies, it will aid future
predictions of ocean circulation fluctuations, weather patterns and climate
change.
"People
in coastal areas will benefit from improved near-real-time data on ocean
conditions, while people everywhere will benefit from better seasonal
predictions resulting from the increased understanding of Earth system
processes enabled by these measurements," said Michael Freilich, director
of the Earth Science Division of NASA's science directorate.
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