Apr 22, 2011 13:47 GMT  ·  By

The American space agency's Earth-observing capabilities have developed a great deal since 1968, when the first photo of Earth was taken by the Apollo 8 crew. At this point, they are bound to increase even further, as NASA gears up to enter a new age in exploring our planet from orbit.

One of the most potent tools NASA – and indeed the entire world – have at their disposal is the Earth Observing System (EOS), a group of about 14 satellite whose sole mission is to monitor and detect slight variations that develop in our planet's cycle.

They are surveying the atmosphere, soils, oceans, vegetation, aerosols, dust, greenhouse gases, clouds, ice sheets, rain patterns, winds, cyclones and even coastline erosion, but scientists want access to even more impressive volumes of data.

Moving past the tremendous engineering achievement it represents, the satellites in the EOS constellation paved the way to a much more important thing, which is an interdisciplinary approach to conducting Earth science.

This was the foundation of a major paradigm shift in natural sciences, where Earth systems and cycles began to be viewed as interconnecting actors on the same stage, rather than as separate entities.

In the four decades since NASA began Earth studies, experts with the agency and hundreds of partner universities have published thousands of study papers, which allowed us to understand our home better.

But the agency has no intention of stopping here, as evidence by its ongoing satellite project called the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP). This spacecraft is the size of a minibus, and its mission will be to monitor atmospheric, oceanic and land-based phenomena from a single platform.

“The EOS satellites have built a spectacular foundation, but they won’t last indefinitely,” explains the senior project scientist for the EOS constellation, Steven Platnick He is referring to the three flagship satellite in the project, called Terra, Aqua and Aura.

“When you’re dealing with climate, by definition you’re working with long time scales. We’ve started building a whole set of databases in the last decade, and gaps in them would prove huge obstacles to understanding what’s happening with the climate and why,” adds Christina Hsu.

The expert, who is the deputy project scientist for the NPP mission, holds an appointment as an aerosol specialist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Maryland.

She adds that the NPP will be put in a polar orbit around Earth, at an altitude of about 824 kilometers (512 miles). The spacecraft will carry out around 14 full orbits per day, updating datasets that NASA already has constantly.

“While the original EOS flagships were primarily climate research satellites, NPP is more of a hybrid that will serve both climate scientists and meteorologists,” GSFC NPP project scientist James Gleason goes on to say.

“It stands as a bridge between EOS and the next generation of operational climate and weather satellites, which is called the Joint Polar Satellite System, or JPSS,” he concludes.