NASA Launches New Mission To Survey Nearly All Water On Earth Surface

SWOT will measure the height of water in freshwater bodies and the ocean on more than 90% of Earth's surface, NASA said. It will start collecting science data in about 6 months.

NASA launched its latest Earth science satellite on Friday that will track nearly all the water on surface of Earth. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft was launched atop a SpaceX rocket at around 5.15 pm IST on Friday, from the Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the US space agency said.

According to NASA, SWOT is the first satellite mission that will observe nearly all water on Earth's surface. It has been jointly developed by NASA and France's Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency and the United Kingdom Space Agency.

NASA said the satellite would measure the height of water in freshwater bodies and also the ocean on more than 90 percent of Earth's surface. This information, it said, will provide insights into how the ocean water influences climate change, and how a global warming impacts lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. It will also tell how communities can better prepare for natural disasters such as floods.

“Warming seas, extreme weather, more severe wildfires – these are only some of the consequences humanity is facing due to climate change,” the NASA statement quoted Administrator Bill Nelson as saying. “The climate crisis requires an all-hands-on-deck approach, and SWOT is the realization of a long-standing international partnership that will ultimately better equip communities so that they can face these challenges,” he added.

According to NASA, SWOT will start collecting science data in about six months, after undergoing a series of checks and calibrations. Ground controllers successfully acquiring the satellite's signal after it separated from the second stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the agency said.

The spacecraft will cover the entire surface of Earth between 78 degrees south and 78 degrees north latitude at least once every 21 days, and will send back about 1 TB of unprocessed data every day. "The scientific heart of SWOT is an innovative instrument called the Ka-band radar interferometer (KaRIn), which marks a major technological advance. KaRIn bounces radar pulses off the water’s surface and receives the return signal using two antennas on either side of the spacecraft," NASA said in its statement. This arrangement of one signal and two antennas will help engineers "precisely determine the height of the water’s surface across two swaths at a time, each of them 30 miles (50 kilometers) wide", it said.