The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has launched the new Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California on Saturday, Jan. 31.
The successful liftoff was the U.S. space agency's third attempt to launch the craft. The launch was originally scheduled on Thursday, Jan. 29, but winds caused a 24-hour delay. A minor rocket repair conducted the next day pushed the launch to Saturday.
The SMAP satellite, which was launched on top of an unmanned United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket, was sent into space to map the moisture level of the world's topsoil and will serve as one of the ultimate new tools that scientists can use to track drought, forecast weather and monitor climate change.
NASA officials said that the satellite had a flawless launch and was able to deploy its solar arrays. During a post-launch press conference, SMAP project manager Kent Kellogg said that the SMAP spacecraft is in excellent health with all the subsystems powered on and checked out as they were intended.
SMAP's instruments will be turned on 11 days after the launch to comply with the timeline of the mission. Once it is fully deployed, the 2,000-pound SMAP satellite will measure the moisture in the upper two inches of the Earth's soil by aiming two microwave-emitting instruments at the surface of the planet.
Jared Entin, NASA's Washington-based project scientist for the SMAP mission, said that these instruments will collect data about the soil on Earth more accurately than ever before, enabling the space agency to determine not just the moisture content of the topsoil worldwide but to calculate the water depth to about three feet as well.
SMAP's big and rotating antenna measuring nearly 20 feet in diameter is the biggest of its kind that was launched into space. This antenna will play a crucial role in the mission as it will help in the creation of a global map of the moisture level of the world's topsoil every three days over the course of the mission's initial lifespan of three years.
"SMAP will provide new insights into the global water, energy and carbon cycles. Combining data from all our orbiting missions will give us a much better understanding of how the Earth system works," said Michael Freilich, Earth Science Division director of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
