NASA’s soil monitoring satellite to launch Thursday

NASA currently has a probe approaching Pluto and another probe approaching the dwarf planet CERES in the asteroid belt. The agency has put men on the moon, mans the international space station and is planning missions to go to Mars and Venus. Given all of this, the scheduled launch on Thursday of a satellite to study and monitor the Earth’s dirt may not seem very glamorous.

To say that dirt is taken for granted is an understatement. It is generally something people try to avoid and the threat of dirt is used to sell us all sorts of soaps, detergents and cleansers. For most people, most of the time, dirt is the ultimate dirty word. However, over the course of the next century that is likely to change.

As the impact of climate change begins to be felt some areas will experience severe droughts, other areas will experience devastating floods and some areas will experience both. The western U.S. is currently experiencing a severe drought. Researchers are increasingly concerned that it could become a ‘megadrought’ lasting 100 years or more, which would wipe out agriculture in the region.

According to a new report from a blue ribbon panel commission on the economic impact of climate change in the US, the midwest is headed for a drought of its own. By the end of the century, various regions of America’s primary farming region will see declines in crop yield ranging from 11 to 69 percent. All of this will happen while Earth’s population increases from its current 7 billion people to somewhere between 9 and 11 billion people.

If these predictions come to pass, dirt is going to seem very important.

The Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite (SMAP) will launch from Vandenberg Air Force base in California at 9:20 EST on January 29.

SMAP is designed to return data on the moisture of Earth’s dirt, making a new global map of the planet’s soil moisture levels every three days. Four small cube satellites (cubesats) will be launching on board the same rocket. The first, ExoCue, will monitor the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Two Firebird cubesats will monitor the Earth’s radiation environment. The final cubsat, GRIFEX, is a demonstration project.

The new satellite data will help researchers at NASA and elsewhere to create more accurate weather models and predict droughts and floods.

“What the soil measurements will do is improve our weather forecasts, improve our assessments of water availability and also address some issues dealing with long-term climate variability and assessments of the impact of human intervention in the global environment. All of these come together and it’s the metabolism, how it responds, just like a human body,” said Dara Entekhabi, SMAP science team leader, according to Space.com.

Sometime after launch, SMAP will deploy the largest mesh antenna that NASA has ever placed on a spacecraft. The 20 foot satellite will spin at 14.6 revolutions per minute gathering data. While SMAP orbits the Earth, once every 98.5 minutes, it will measure the moisture in the top 2 inches of soil around the globe.

“Soil moisture is a key part of the three cycles that support life on this planet: the water cycle, the energy cycle and the carbon cycle. These things affect human interest: flood, drought, disease control, weather,” said NASA SMAP program executive Christine Bonniksen.

Thursdays launch will be broadcast live on NASA TV. Additional information about SMAP is available from smap.jpl.nasa.gov.

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