Day: June 17, 2019

Water is a complex problem on Earth: Some places get far too little of it and some get far too much.

That’s why NASA and its international partners are tracking the flow of freshwater across the world in hopes of improving access to it for the billions of us who depend on it. Satellites study how water moves through its cycle. Sometimes it evaporates from warm oceans in the tropics, condenses into clouds and then falls back into the ground as snow or rain. The water might stay in a river or lake — or freeze, locked within ice or snow. It can either evaporate into the atmosphere or soak into the ground, moistening the soil or filling an aquifer.

“Fresh water is critically important to humans, both in obvious ways and in unseen ways, such as moving heat around Earth’s entire climate system,” Jared Entin, terrestrial hydrology program manager in the Earth Science division at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. “With our current satellites, we are now making great progress in pinning down both the detail needed for local water decisions and the global view essential to better understanding our changing climate.”

Related: Earth Day 2019: These Amazing NASA Images Show Earth from Above

NASA supports several water-management applications tailored to the needs of different communities. The agency’s Western Water Applications Office, for example, works with multiple entities in the western U.S. to track how drought affects agriculture and water supplies.

Internationally, NASA works with the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide satellite data, computing tools and training through the SERVIR program. The program is intended to help African partners generate better flood forecasts and improve understanding of how the climate is changing snow packs in the Himalayas, among other applications.

Frozen water is just as important as liquid water, which is why NASA programs also monitor snow. NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory program and California’s Department of Water Resources work together to put instruments on airplanes. These devices track the amount of water stored as snow across western U.S. states’ watersheds. That monitoring helps scientists learn more about the timing of the spring melt.

Another snowy bit of research is SnowEx, which links field measurements of snow in the Colorado Rocky Mountains with measurements made by remote sensing by airplanes and satellites. By matching up the two types of measurements, NASA experts hope to design more comprehensive snow-measuring satellites that can reduce the need for on-the-ground data gathering.

Then there’s airborne water, which NASA tracks through a global collaboration that can deliver hourly measurements of rainfall around the world. This data shows how freshwater moves around the world; sometimes this is the only information available that can give scientists a sense of soil moisture, too.

Finally, NASA satellites that monitor the gravity field of Earth can show water hidden underground. A third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are under stress from human agriculture and other “water demands,” according to NASA, particularly in the Central Valley of California, the Indus Basin in northwestern India and Pakistan, and the Arabian Aquifer System in Saudi Arabia. More accurate measurements of how much water is lurking underground can help resource managers allot that water more effectively.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

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One of the questions facing any company as it brings a new rocket to market is what to put on top of the booster. After all, things can sometimes go all explodey with inaugural flights. So the first flight of any rocket typically serves as demonstration missions, to prove via an actual test flight that all of a company’s modeling and ground testing were correct. SpaceX famously put Elon Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster on the first flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket.

Despite a sometimes whimsical payload, however, first flights demonstrate a number of capabilities to potential customers. (In the case of the Falcon Heavy, the rocket’s upper stage performed a six-hour coast in space before re-firing its upper stage engine to demonstrate the ability to directly inject key satellites into geostationary space for the U.S. military).

As the Austin, Texas-based rocket company Firefly nears the first flight of its Alpha rocket, the company also faces such a payload decision. It has an (undisclosed) customer for the flight, but the smallsat launcher also has some unused capacity for the mission—the Alpha rocket has about twice as much lift as an existing competitor, Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle.

So on Monday, Firefly announced that it will accept some academic and educational payloads free of charge on the Alpha flight. “We’ve wanted to do something like this on our first flight from the beginning,” Markusic said. The payloads will fly to a 300km circular orbit, with a 97-degree inclination.

Space for all

The initiative is part of Firefly’s efforts to make space more affordable for everyone, said company founder Tom Markusic in an interview with Ars. As part of this DREAM program—that’s Dedicated Research and Education Accelerator Mission—the company will accept anything from a child’s drawing to college experiments, or even a startup company’s CubeSat. Applications will be accepted through the end of June, 2019.

By co-manifesting a commercial customer along with several other private payloads, Firefly will be able to demonstrate a capability to “rideshare” missions from the very beginning, Markusic said. This would allow multiple commercial customers to fly on missions in the future.

Markusic also provided an update on Alpha’s development. In April, the company performed a full-duration test of the rocket’s integrated second stage. A configuration of this second stage that is “97 percent flight-like” will be tested by the end of June. The company is also working toward full tests of the Reaver 1 engines that will power the Alpha rocket’s first stage, and integrated stage tests should begin by late August or early September.

He admitted that pushing toward a December launch from California’s Vandeberg Air Force Base is aggressive, and that to make it the company must meet a tight schedule of milestones. Objectively, a December launch is doable. Historically, however, Markusic said he realizes that problems often occur during stage testing and other activities that have the potential to delay launch dates.