We're now targeting no earlier than 6:46am ET (1146 UTC) on Friday, Dec. 16, for launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission. The satellite is healthy & the forecast remains favorable for liftoff on Friday morning. Follow for mission updates.
SWOT is the first satellite mission that will observe nearly all water on Earth’s surface, measuring the height of water in the planet’s lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and the ocean. SWOT’s instruments will be able to resolve ocean features like currents and eddies less than 60 miles across, lakes and reservoirs larger than 15 acres , and rivers wider than 330 feet across.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built the scientific payload. In June 2021, JPL shipped the payload to France, where a multinational team integrated the Ka-band Radar Interferometer and other finely tuned instruments with the satellite bus. On Oct. 16, SWOT arrived at Vandenberg from France aboard a U.S. Air Force C-5 Galaxy aircraft and moved to the Astrotech Space Operations facility to begin launch processing. In the coming weeks, SWOT will undergo many steps in preparation for liftoff. Teams must encapsulate the satellite in a protective payload fairing, mate it to the rocket, and transport it to the launch pad before it’s ready to launch into space., a process that affects global temperatures and climate change.
SWOT is a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatial , with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is managing the launch service.
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