Dedicated to delivering a wealth of new information on exactly how clouds and aerosols affect Earth’s climate, ESA’s EarthCARE satellite has had the chance to show off prior to engineers embarking upon the careful task of packing it up for its journey to the launch site in the US.
Carrying four different instruments, this remarkable satellite is the most complex of ESA’s Earth Explorer missions – missions that return key scientific information that advances our understanding of how planet Earth works as a system and the impact that humans are having on natural processes. With the climate crisis increasingly tightening its grip, the Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer, or EarthCARE for short, was developed to shed new light on the complex interactions between clouds, aerosols and radiation within the Earth’s atmosphere.
Clouds and, to a lesser extent, aerosols reflect incoming solar energy back out to space, but they also trap outgoing infrared energy. This leads to a net effect of either cooling or heating. In addition, aerosols influence the life cycle of clouds and so contribute indirectly to their radiative effect. EarthCARE’s set of four state-of-the-art instruments will work together to provide a holistic view of complex interplay between clouds, aerosols and radiation to yield new insight into Earth’s radiation balance against the backdrop of the climate crisis.
With liftoff slated for May on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, EarthCARE has been going through the last round of tests and meticulous checks in Germany. Now ready to be declared fit to travel, the two-tonne EarthCARE satellite has been standing proud on display in a cleanroom at Airbus’ facilities in Friedrichshafen.
ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Simonetta Cheli, said, “Although EarthCARE is an ESA mission, we pay special thanks to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, which has supplied the cloud profiling radar, one of the satellites key measuring instruments.”
