Launching in spring 2024, the two small satellites of the agency’s PREFIRE mission will fill in missing data from Earth’s polar regions.
Launching in spring 2024, the two small satellites of the agency’s PREFIRE mission will fill in missing data from Earth’s polar regions.
Two new miniature NASA satellites will start crisscrossing Earth’s atmosphere in a few months, detecting heat lost to space. Their observations from the planet’s most bone-chilling regions will help predict how our ice, seas, and weather will change in the face of global warming.
About the size of a shoebox, the cube satellites, or CubeSats, comprise a mission called PREFIRE, short for Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment. Equipped with technology proven at Mars, their objective is to reveal the full spectrum of heat loss from Earth’s polar regions for the first time, making climate models more accurate.
PREFIRE has been jointly developed by NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with team members from the universities of Michigan and Colorado.
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Image: Sunlight glints off patches of ice in the Chukchi Sea, a part of the Arctic Ocean. NASA’s PREFIRE mission to Earth’s polar regions will explore how a warming world will affect sea ice loss, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise. (Credit: NASA/Kathryn Hansen)
