WASHINGTON — NASA is making progress on a multibillion-dollar series of Earth science missions amid uncertainty about their funding for the next year.
In town hall sessions at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in December, NASA officials discussed work on the Earth System Observatory, a series of missions intended to implement the five “designated observables” recommended by the Earth science decadal survey in 2018.
Four missions are currently in early phases of development for the Earth System Observatory: the Atmosphere Observing System (AOS)-Storm, AOS-Sky, Surface Biology and Geology, and Mass Change, which NASA recently renamed GRACE-Continuity or GRACE-C to emphasize its links to the GRACE and GRACE-Follow On missions. A fifth mission, Surface Deformation and Change, is an extended study phase so that the agency can incorporate lessons from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission launching in the spring of 2024.
These missions “are intended to answer a wide variety of questions” in Earth science, said Karen St. Germain, director of the Earth science division at NASA Headquarters, in one town hall session, and “to integrate observations, science and applications for societal benefit.”
The Earth System Observatory represents the “core missions” of Earth science for NASA in the future, she said, alongside a series of smaller missions. “They exist in a larger ecosystem of competed missions.”
Those missions, though, will not be cheap. The first four missions have an estimated cost of $3.5 billion, including $1.8 billion to $1.99 billion for AOS-Storm and AOS-Sky. St. Germain, though, noted that several international partners will contribute an additional $1.2 billion in instruments and spacecraft for the effort. “It allows us to do more together than the sum of what we could do individually,” she said. “We’re trying to get the maximum science per U.S. dollar…
Read the full article here