28/05/2024
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With liftoff now set for 29 May at 00:20 CEST (28 May, 15:20 local time), ESA’s EarthCARE satellite ready for launch at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Once in orbit, this new satellite is set to revolutionise our understanding of how clouds and aerosols affect Earth’s climate.
Over the last six weeks, the team of satellite engineers at the base have been meticulously preparing EarthCARE for launch. This culminated in the all-important ‘launch readiness review’, which signalled the green light for liftoff.
ESA’s EarthCARE Project Manager, Dirk Bernaerts, said, “I’d like to congratulate everyone who has worked so hard to get us to this point, including our Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, and our industrial partners.
“It was an emotional moment for those of us here in Vandenberg who were able to bid farewell to our precious satellite while we watched it being encapsulated within the two-halves of the rocket fairing, as it will never be ‘seen’ again by human eyes. Of course, our real good-byes will come when we see EarthCARE take to the skies.”
ESA’s Launch Campaign Manager for EarthCARE, Bill Simpson, added, “The six-week campaign here in California to ready EarthCARE for liftoff included a very long to-do list, but everything has gone really well and that’s thanks to all of the various teams working hard together to get the job done.
“The campaign has included tests that ensure that EarthCARE was in good health after its journey from Germany, the hazardous task of fuelling and encapsulating it in the Falcon 9 rocket fairing, which protects the satellite during the first stages of launch.”
EarthCARE, the most complex of all of ESA’s Earth Explorer missions, will shed new light on the role that clouds and aerosols play in heating and cooling Earth’s atmosphere, thereby contributing to a better understanding of climate change.
The state of our climate depends on a highly complex system involving intricate feedback loops and interactions between various components. It encompasses the processes that control the distribution of energy from the Sun across Earth’s surface and the subsequent redistribution of heat through various mechanisms.
Understanding these interactions and mechanisms is essential for assessing the impact of human activity, predicting future climate trends and implementing effective strategies for climate mitigation and adaptation.
While scientists know that clouds and aerosols play extremely important roles in both cooling and warming our atmosphere, there remains uncertainty when it comes to accounting for the exact influence they have on Earth’s energy balance and, given the ongoing climate crisis, if they will exert an overall cooling or warming effect in the future.
EarthCARE, which carries a set of four state-of-the-art instruments that work together, will deliver a wealth of data that will further our understanding of this important area of science, improve future climate models and support numerical weather prediction.
EarthCARE is a joint venture between ESA and JAXA.