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Thomas Yunck, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had written the first proposal years earlier to use RO to develop weather and climate information from GPS signals. Conventional weather satellites are individually constructed and can cost as much as $3 billion to $5 billion to develop and launch.īut Lautenbacher later learned that others shared his enthusiasm for RO. But NOAA budgets were tight, and what he needed was a new breed of smaller satellites and a cheap way to launch them.Īt the time, this seemed like mission impossible. The signals create a profile of precise information that space-based receivers could record and transmit to Earth.Īfter his first briefing on RO, Lautenbacher was hooked. These are the data that meteorologists traditionally collect, using ground stations, tall towers, radio-equipped balloons and conventional space sensors to develop accurate weather predictions.Īs the GPS satellites drop below the horizon, orbiting receivers tracking them could observe their changing radio signals. Properly translated, the bending angles would reveal the atmospheric density, pressure, temperature and moisture content.
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If there were small orbiting satellites carrying sensitive radio receivers that could capture signals from the navigation satellites, those slightly distorted signals would contain a kind of code. Scientists began to realize that the bending was different depending on each signal's journey through slices of the atmosphere. The atmosphere bent or distorted these signals by varying degrees. global positioning system (GPS), began orbiting the Earth, giving off precise radio signals developed to guide military ships and planes. By the 1980s, the Earth's first navigation satellites, parts of the U.S. Scientists had long noted that electromagnetic waves bent slightly as they passed through the Earth's atmosphere. Bush appointed him to run NOAA in 2001, Lautenbacher was given a briefing on RO.
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It is called radio occultation, or "RO," as Conrad Lautenbacher, a former administrator of NOAA, likes to call it. The second breakthrough is a new way of measuring atmospheric conditions from space. government-sponsored innovations that evolved to make this possible. The idea of using small, relatively inexpensive satellites to improve weather and climate data is the first of two U.S. His company searches the world to find reliable, but low-cost, capacity on U.S., Indian, Russian and other launch vehicles. It continues to mass-produce Lemurs at a rate of one per week, and when it has launched 200 satellites, "we're going to see the whole Earth in terms of line of sight," explained MacDonald. He is the director of its "global validation model." It's an effort to replace government-built satellite systems that collect and then share data with much cheaper privately owned systems, which in turn collect and sell weather, climate and other kinds of needed information to governments and private customers around the world.Įight of Spire's tiny "Lemur" satellites were among those launched from the Indian rocket, bringing the company's total "constellation" of operational satellites to 52. It could also be a win for MacDonald's business, Spire Global Inc., based in San Francisco. "My position is that this is a huge win for the world," said Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald, a meteorologist and former research laboratory director for NOAA. They are already beginning to fill the growing gaps in Earth's observations systems, which consist of much larger, far more expensive government-owned satellites that may eventually become obsolete. Placing large numbers of them in orbit will allow their miniaturized sensors to measure conditions in the atmosphere and on the planet's surface with a precision that could vastly improve future predictions of weather and climate change. The feat called attention to a new space race, one featuring tiny satellites that are roughly the size of a half-gallon milk carton and sprout antennas and solar panels. companies and institutions, which built 96 of the hand-sized orbiters. It was a world record for India and a critical milestone for U.S. An Indian-made rocket called PSLV-C37 soared 310 miles into the Earth's ionosphere last February and launched 104 space satellites, spitting them out rapidly from both sides.