Video: NASA Previews New Mission to Track Water in Earth’s Soil
NASA held a media briefing on Thursday, Jan. 8, at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC to discuss the upcoming Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission.
SMAP, set for a Jan. 29 launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, will provide the most accurate, highest-resolution global measurements of soil moisture ever obtained from space and will detect whether the ground is frozen or thawed. The data will be used to enhance scientists’ understanding of the processes that link Earth’s water, energy and carbon cycles.
The briefing participants were:
– Christine Bonniksen, SMAP program executive with the Science Mission Directorate’s Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington
– Kent Kellogg, SMAP project manager with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California
– Dara Entekhabi, SMAP science team lead, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
– Brad Doorn, SMAP applications lead, Science Mission Directorate’s Applied Sciences Program at NASA Headquarters
SMAP is the last of five NASA Earth science missions scheduled for launch within a 12-month period. NASA monitors Earth’s vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth’s interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing.
