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lunes, 29 de junio de 2015

NASA| Aquarius: One Year Observing the Salty Seas.- NASA | Acuario: Un año de observación de los mares salados

Credits: NASA/Goddard

Este vídeo ofrece un recorrido global de la superficie del mar de salinidad usando mediciones tomadas por instrumento Aquarius de la NASA a bordo de la nave espacial Aquarius / SAC-D, a partir de diciembre de 2011 hasta diciembre de 2012. El rojo representa las zonas de alta salinidad, mientras que el azul representa las zonas de baja salinidad. Acuario es un esfuerzo concentrado para medir la salinidad superficial del mar y proporcionará la visión global de la variabilidad de la salinidad necesaria para el estudio del clima. La misión es una colaboración entre la NASA y la Agencia Espacial Argentina (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales).

Artist’s rendering of the Aquarius/SAC-D satellite
Artist’s rendering of the Aquarius/SAC-D satellite as it would appear in orbit. The Aquarius mission studied the interactions between changes in the ocean circulation, global water cycle and climate by measuring ocean surface salinity.
Credits: NASA
Aquarius/SAC-D satellite
Simple diagram of the Aquarius/SAC-D satellite
Credits: NASA
The Aquarius/Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC)-D satellite observatory, was an international collaboration between NASA and Argentina’s space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), with participation from Brazil, Canada, France and Italy. NASA launched Aquarius/SAC-D from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on June 10, 2011.
Aquarius was a pathfinder mission to demonstrate that accurate, scientifically-significant measurements of salinity could be made from space. It was also the first mission to combine use of passive (radiometer) and active (radar) measurements at L-band.
The instrument’s surface salinity measurements are contributing to a better understanding of ocean dynamics and advancing climate and ocean models, both from season to season and year to year. These models still are improving El Niño prediction. Aquarius global salinity maps are revealing how freshwater plumes coming from the mouth of large rivers and the precipitation and evaporation over the oceans affect the salinity structure of the ocean.
“The Aquarius sensor collected three years and nine months of valuable data,” said Aquarius principal investigator Gary Lagerloef of Earth & Space Research, Seattle. “It was truly a pioneering effort to determine how accurately we could measure ocean salinity from space and for the first time study large and small-scale interactions of the global water cycle.”
Preliminary indications are that an onboard hardware component called a Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) shut down, which caused the loss of onboard power regulation and spacecraft attitude stabilization.
Salinity information is critical to improving our understanding of two major components of Earth’s climate system: the water cycle and ocean circulation. By measuring ocean salinity from space, Aquarius provided new insights into the massive natural exchange of freshwater between the ocean, atmosphere and sea ice, which – in turn – influences ocean circulation, weather and climate.
Data from Aquarius revealed how extreme floods impact our seas and how low-salinity river plumes affect hurricane intensity. Aquarius data also were integral to the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), a year-long international field study of the oceanographic processes that sustain the maximum surface salinities in the central subtropical North Atlantic, and influence global ocean circulation.
The Aquarius instrument was jointly built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. JPL managed Aquarius through the mission’s commissioning phase and archives mission data. Goddard managed the mission’s operations phase and processes Aquarius science data. CONAE provided the SAC-D spacecraft, an optical camera, a thermal camera in collaboration with Canada, a microwave radiometer, sensors developed by various Argentine institutions, and the mission operations center in Argentina. France and Italy also contributed instruments.
For more on the Aquarius/SAC-D mission, visit:
For more information about NASA’s Earth science activities, visit:
Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington                                                                                              
Rani Gran
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Alan Buis
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Last Updated: June 29, 2015
Editor: Karen Northon
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui