NASA prepares trio of space missions for launch

Tuesday November 26, 2002

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) NASA said Tuesday it is on track to launch in coming weeks a trio of Earth-orbiting missions to examine hot plasma, cool ice and the winds that whip over the world's oceans.

NASA's SeaWinds, a radar instrument that will measure wind speed and direction over 90 percent of the oceans each day, is slated for launch Dec. 14 from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center. The $154 million instrument is part of the Japanese Advanced Earth Observation Satellite II.

The two others, the $282 million Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, or Icesat, and the $16 million Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer satellite, or Chipsat, will follow on Dec. 19 when they are scheduled for launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The two will share a single rocket for the ride to orbit.

The three missions are markedly different, but together will further NASA's mission, said Ghassem Asrar, the agency's associate administrator for Earth science.

``Each of them have their own scientific objective but at the end the plan is to collectively integrate this knowledge ... to understand our position in our solar system and the rest of the universe,'' Asrar said Tuesday during a briefing held at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., and broadcast at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Icesat will use radar to measure variations in the elevation of the ice sheets that cover Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere to allow scientists to track any changes in their volume, said project scientist Jay Zwally. Scientists suspect ice melt contributes to the global rise in ocean levels, but are uncertain by how much, Zwally said.

Chipsat will peer outward in space and look for the signature of one or more supernova explosions thought to have cleared out a region around the solar system 2 million to 10 million years ago. Specifically, the University of California, Berkeley-built instrument will focus on the glow of the interstellar medium, the gas that fills the space between the stars.

SeaWinds will be the latest in a series of instruments to measure ocean winds from space. The data are used to study ocean circulation and can give an early indication of climate phenomena such as El Nino.

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On the Net:

http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/

http://chips.ssl.berkeley.edu/

http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/seawinds/seaindex.html

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)