NASA’s PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) mission has successfully launched its second CubeSat, marking a significant step in understanding how Earth’s ice, seas, and weather will evolve in a warming climate. The CubeSat launched at 3:15 p.m. NZST, Wednesday (11:15 p.m. EDT, June 4) from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in Māhia, New Zealand, aboard the Electron rocket. This follows the first PREFIRE CubeSat launch on May 25.
These shoebox-sized CubeSats are designed to provide critical data to improve predictions on climate change impacts. After a 30-day checkout period to confirm their operational status, the mission will gather data for approximately 10 months.
“By helping to clarify the role that Earth’s polar regions play in regulating our planet’s energy budget, the PREFIRE mission will ultimately help improve climate and ice models,” said Amanda Whitehurst, PREFIRE program executive at NASA Headquarters. “Improved models will benefit humanity by giving us a better idea of how our climate and weather patterns will change in the coming years.”
PREFIRE aims to understand the balance between the incoming heat energy from the Sun and the outgoing heat emitted from Earth’s poles. The polar regions act like radiators, shedding much of the heat absorbed at the tropics back into space, primarily as far-infrared radiation. The mission will measure the far-infrared energy radiated from the Arctic and Antarctic, influenced by water vapor content, cloud structure, and composition.
Brian Drouin, PREFIRE’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), emphasized the mission’s relevance. “Climate change is reshaping our environment and atmosphere in ways that we need to prepare for,” he said. “This mission will give us new measurements of the far-infrared wavelengths emitted from Earth’s poles, which we can use to improve climate and weather models and help people around the world deal with the consequences of climate change.”
Each CubeSat is equipped with a thermal infrared spectrometer, featuring advanced infrared sensors to measure far-infrared wavelengths with unprecedented sensitivity. These observations are expected to lead to more accurate predictions about sea level rise, weather patterns, and changes in snow and ice cover.
Laurie Leshin, director at NASA JPL, highlighted the importance of the data collected by the PREFIRE CubeSats. “Their observations will lead to more accurate predictions about sea level rise, weather patterns, and changes in snow and ice cover, which will help us navigate the challenges of a warming world.”
The PREFIRE mission was jointly developed by NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. NASA JPL manages the mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate and provided the spectrometers. Blue Canyon Technologies built the CubeSats, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will process the data. Rocket Lab USA Inc. of Long Beach, California, provided the launch services.–News Desk