NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, has successfully passed its design reviews and moved into its construction and testing phase, preparing to advance the fields of global ocean and atmospheric science when it launches in 2023.
After passing its last critical design review in February 2020 – a rigorous evaluation by NASA science and engineering experts to ensure the mission and its components are sound before starting the building process – PACE has entered its integration and testing phase of development. An engineering test unit of its key instrument, the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), is under construction at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and both the instrument and spacecraft will soon be tested in rigorous conditions that simulate launch and orbit.
The mission even has a ride locked in: SpaceX of Hawthorne, California will provide a Falcon 9 Full Thrust rocket to post the PACE spacecraft to its orbit 420 miles above Earth.
“The PACE project spent five years creating our mission design, and this milestone is proof that it’s credible,” said Jeremy Werdell, an oceanographer in the Ocean Ecology Laboratory at NASA Goddard and PACE’s project scientist. “Test versions of PACE’s instruments were evaluated to support these critical design reviews. Watching OCI be built has finally made the mission feel real. It’s incredibly exciting to see its design realized in hardware, with test results confirming that it performs even better than expected.”
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Image via NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
