Japan to Launch US Satellite to Map Earth's Rain & Snow Today: Watch It Live

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Japan to Launch US Satellite to Map Earth's Rain & Snow Today: Watch It Live
SPACE.com
by Stephen Clark, Spaceflight Now  6 hours ago



An artist's illustration of the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory satellite built by NASA and JAXA to measure the Earth's rain and snow fall like never before. The satellite is launching on Feb. 27, 2014 from Japan's Tanegashima



Japan is preparing to launch a U.S.-built satellite Thursday (Feb. 27) to track rainfall and snowfall over the bulk of the world's population, anchoring an international initiative to better understand Earth's water cycle and its relationship to storms, droughts and climate change.

The Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory is set for liftoff in a two-hour launch window opening at 1837 GMT (1:37 p.m. EST) aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.

The launch window begins at 3:37 a.m. Japan Standard Time on Friday. You can watch the launch live on Spaceflight Now via the Mission Status Center. You can also watch the launch webcast live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT).

The 174-foot-tall rocket will blast off from Launch Pad No. 1 at Yoshinobu Launch Complex, a facility on the rugged southeast coastline of Tanegashima Island off the southern shore of Japan's main island chain.

Flying southeast over the Pacific Ocean, the orange and black launcher will let go of two solid-fueled boosters about two minutes after liftoff. Six-and-a-half minutes into the mission, the rocket's hydrogen-fueled LE-7A main engine will turn off and the first stage will fall away, leaving the H-2A's second stage to propel the 8,500-pound satellite faster than five miles per second.

Deployment of the GPM spacecraft is expected less than 16 minutes after launch. Ten minutes later, the satellite's two solar array wings will unfurl to begin charging on-board batteries.

Two months of activation and commissioning tasks are planned before the satellite gets down to business.

The GPM Core Observatory is the centerpiece of a worldwide program to synthesize observations from disparate international satellites into a database of global rainfall and snowfall every three hours.
   
"Why are we flying GPM? Rain and snowfall affect our daily lives in many ways," said Steve Neeck, NASA's deputy associate administrator for Earth science flight programs. "The distribution of precipitation ... directly affects the availability of fresh water for sustaining life. Extreme precipitation events like hurricanes, blizzards, floods, droughts and landslides have significant socio-economic impacts on our society."



A Japanese H-2A rocket carrying the NASA-Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory is seen as it rolls out to launch pad 1 of the Tanegashima Space Center, Thursday, Feb. 27, 2014,


Designed and built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the GPM Core satellite weighs more than four tons fully fueled. It is about the size of a fire truck, and its solar panels deploy to a wingspan comparable to that of a small business jet, according to Art Azarbarzin, NASA's GPM project manager.

"Since rainfall and snowfall vary greatly from place to place and in space and time, satellites can provide a more uniform set for observations globally compared to ground instruments," Neeck said in a prelaunch press conference.

The GPM satellite hosts two instruments to peer inside storms and through cloud layers from an altitude of more than 250 miles.

One of the payloads, the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will scan the planet to acquire three-dimensional views of rain and snow showers.

NASA's GPM Microwave Imager, or GMI, built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. will measure the total precipitation suspended inside clouds and falling to Earth.

"The GMI will sense the total precipitation within all cloud layers, including, for the first time, light rain and snowfall," Neeck said. "The DPR will make detailed three-dimensional measurements of precipitation structures and rates as well as particle drop size.

NASA and JAXA, the Japanese space agency, combined to spend nearly $1.2 billion on the GPM Core Observatory. The U.S. government's contribution totaled $933 million, including the spacecraft, ground systems and the microwave instrument. Japan's investment was worth $226 million to pay for the dual-frequency radar and the H-2A launch vehicle.

The space agencies have worked on the mission for more than a decade as a follow-up to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM, which launched in November 1997 and has functioned more than five times longer than designed.

Precipitation observations by TRMM are limited to the tropics and subtropics. The satellite's orbit only flies between 35 degrees north and south of the equator, and TRMM's Ku-band radar instrument can only detect heavy rainfall.


http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/ysJSqTJ0QQTMMCgOgu5Nqg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTM5MTtweW9mZj0wO3E9NzU7dz01NzU-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_US/News/SPACE.com/Japan_to_Launch_US_Satellite-c6fe506c45e4ea7cdc9997ec4174d451
NASA technicians spun the Global Precipitation Monitor (GPM) satellite up to just over 10 RPM in Goddard Space Flight Center’s High-Capacity Centrifuge facility March 31, 2011. At that speed, the spin exerted a lateral pressure of 2.4 G’s, or 2


GPM will circle the planet at a higher inclination to observe precipitation as far as 65 degrees north and south of the equator, and the Japanese radar on-board the satellite can see light rain and falling snow, according to scientists.

"Thanks to TRMM, we have accumulated a lot of knowledge on tropical rain systems," said Riko Oki, the lead JAXA scientist for the GPM mission.

Oki says GPM's radar has Ku-band and Ka-band functions. The new Ka-band radar frequency is sensitive to weaker rain storms and frozen precipitation.

The radar works like ground-based weather radars that supply imagery seen on news broadcasts and used to issue real-time severe storm warnings. The instrument sends out a radar wave and registers its reflection off water particles in the atmosphere.
   
   "The difference from ground radar is ground radar can measure a limited area, but spaceborne radar can measure the whole world," said Kinji Furukawa, JAXA's deputy GPM project manager.

GPM will fill gaps in precipitation data over oceans, remote land masses and other undeveloped regions.

The U.S.-built instrument on GPM will tally the sum of all precipitation contained within cloud layers. The 13-channel microwave imager will improve on the resolution of a similar sensor carried aboard the TRMM satellite.

The microwave radiometer has a 3.9-foot-diameter, or 1.2-meter, spinning antenna rotating at 32 rpm.

Gail Skofronick-Jackson, NASA's deputy GPM project scientist, compares the mission to a health check-up for the planet.

With the dual-frequency radar, "we are able to have what we call a CT scan, it's a three-dimensional view of the precipitation and it's just like seeing three-dimensional within the cloud," Skofronick-Jackson says. "The GMI, on the other hand, I like to describe as an X-ray through the cloud. It's a projection of all the liquid and all the ice in the cloud.

"Just like a doctor uses CT scans and X-rays to diagnose what's happening in the human body, GPM Core Observatory is going to use the measurements of the radar and the radiometer to diagnose the precipitation strucutures within the cloud."

The spacecraft launching Thursday joins a network of already-flying international satellite missions developed by the United States, Japan, France, India and Eumetsat, the European weather satellite agency.

Researchers plan to use data from the GPM Core Observatory to calibrate microwave measurements from the other satellites, creating a uniform dataset scientists can rely on in their work.

When scientists incorporate data from the international fleet, they can get a snapshot of all precipitation on Earth every three hours, according to Skofronick-Jackson.

"Precipitation is one of the most basic and important environmental elements relating to our daily lives," Oki said. "We believe that rain and snow information observed by GPM will be to the benefit of all."

You can follow Spaceflight Now's launch coverage of NASA and JAXA's GPM satellite launch via the Mission Status Center here.


http://news.yahoo.com/japan-launch-us-satellite-map-earths-rain-snow-131720351.html

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U.S.-Japan Satellite Set to Aid Storm Forecasts
February 27, 2014, 6:35 PM



Japan’s H-IIA rocket is moved to the launching pad at the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.  Agence France-Presse/Getty Images



The art of forecasting rain, snow and storms is set to get an assist from a new U.S.-Japan satellite being launched early Friday morning.

A Japanese H-IIA rocket is scheduled to lift off before dawn Friday Japan time from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.

Among those observing the launch at the site will be the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, whose father, John F. Kennedy, was the president who proposed putting a man on the moon.

The satellite is part of the Global Precipitation Measurement project, which aims to create the first coordinated international satellite network providing near real-time observations of rain and snow anyplace on the earth.

The real-time feature is expected to come in handy when responding to natural disasters such as the supertyphoon that devastated parts of the Philippines last November. The data should help officials alert people more accurately about looming dangers and issue evacuation orders as early as possible.

Weighing 3.9 tons and measuring 4.5 meters in height, the satellite was assembled at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Its two main components are a Japanese-designed radar unit and a U.S.-designed microwave imager.

NASA engineers gathered on Tanegashima Island to prepare for the launch. Gail Jackson, a visiting NASA project scientist, said in an interview it was a unique experience for NASA to put up one of its satellites outside of the U.S. on another country’s rocket.

Japan’s space industry has been working to break into the crowded global satellite launch business. The H-IIA, managed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd.7011.TO -0.16%, has had a good track record, failing only once in its past 22 launches.

According to the Japanese press, a 53-meter-tall H-IIA costs in the neighborhood of $100 million to launch. Japan is planning to develop a successor to H-IIA called H-III, which it hopes to put into commercial service in 2020.


http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/02/27/u-s-japan-satellite-set-to-aid-storm-forecasts/?mod=yahoo_hs

[Buster's Uncle]

Japan Launches Next-Generation NASA Satellite to Track Rain & Snow
SPACE.com
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer  9 hours ago



A Japanese H-2A rocket launches NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory satellite toward orbit from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan early Feb. 27, 2014 local time. The GPM spacecraft will track Earth's rain and snowfall like


NASA's newest weather satellite soared into space today (Feb. 27), kicking off a mission to observe rainfall and snowfall around the globe in unprecedented detail.

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, a joint effort between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), blasted off aboard an H-2A rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center today at 1:37 p.m. EST (1837 GMT; 3:37 a.m. Feb. 28 local Japan time).

GPM will deliver near real-time observations of precipitation every three hours all over the world, greatly improving scientists' understanding of climate change and the global water cycle, mission officials said.

"This is going to provide us the most accurate and advanced precipitation measurements to date from NASA satellites," Gail Skofronick-Jackson, GPM project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said during a press briefing last month.

The 8,500-pound (3,850 kilograms) GPM Core spacecraft will orbit Earth at an altitude of 253 miles (407 kilometers), about as high up as the International Space Station. It will circle the planet once every 93 minutes, completing about 16 orbits per day.

The satellite will use two instruments — the GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) and the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) — to study rainfall and snowfall from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Antarctic Circle in the south, giving researchers great looks at clouds and storm systems.

"These instruments will allow scientists to see inside clouds," Steve Neeck, deputy associate director of flight programs for NASA's Earth science division, said during the January press conference.

"The GMI will sense the total precipitation within all cloud layers, including, for the first time, light rain and snowfall," he added. "The DPR will make detailed three-dimensional measurements of precipitation structures and rates, as well as particle drop size."

The GPM Core spacecraft will also serve as the anchor of an international network of weather and climate satellites, some of which are already in orbit.

"The GPM, through its core observatory and its constellation of satellites, will dramatically improve our knowledge of global precipitation and our ability to forecast it and its consequences," Neeck said.

The GPM Core satellite — whose cost to NASA is $933 million — was designed to last for a minimum of three years, but mission officials think it will continue to gather data for much longer than that.

"As you know, TRMM was designed for three years, and now it's been 16 years operating," said GPM project manager Art Azarbarzin of NASA Goddard, referring to the NASA-JAXA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite, which launched in 1997. "We have designed the exact same way."


http://news.yahoo.com/japan-launches-next-generation-nasa-satellite-track-rain-190721992.html