Plenary 2

Tuesday, October 8
16:10–16:50

Plenary Session | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Life After Launch: A Snapshot of the First 6 Months of NASA’s PACE Mission

Jeremy Werdell, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA

The NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in the early morning of February 8, 2024. Just 63 days later, data from NASA’s newest Earth-observing satellite became available to the public. These data will extend and improve upon NASA’s 20+ years of global satellite observation of our living oceans, atmospheric aerosols, and cloud and initiate an advanced set of climate-relevant data records. Ultimately, PACE is the first mission to provide daily, truly global measurements with the promise of enabling prediction of the “boom-bust” cycle of fisheries, the appearance of harmful algae, and other factors that affect commercial and recreational industries. PACE also observes clouds and tiny airborne particles known as aerosols that influence air quality and absorb and reflect sunlight, thus warming and cooling the atmosphere.

The road to launch was a long one, encompassing 20 years that were peppered with numerous concept studies, a science definition team report, “optional” instruments, mission cancellations, a government shutdown, multiple community science teams, shattered prisms, advanced retrieval evaluations, and a global pandemic. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Now finally on orbit, PACE stands on the shoulders of some true international giants and fills a fairly unique niche among its contemporaries. In the months since launch and initial data release, the PACE Project applied instrument temporal and system vicarious calibrations, pursued cross-instrument comparisons, conducted performance assessments, explored synergies with other missions, and released advanced science data products. In parallel, the PACE Validation Science Team left for the field and the Post-launch Airborne eXperiment (PACE-PAX) executed its mission. And, most importantly, preliminary science results were realized.

Here, I describe the challenged journey to orbit, attempt to place PACE appropriately in the current consumer’s market of ocean color instruments, and present a snapshot of post-launch activities and their impacts and outcomes, encompassing the first half year of the PACE mission.

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