NASA Extends University of Montana-Affiliated Terra Satelllite Mission

A NASA review panel recently announced it will extend the mission of the space agency’s Terra environmental satellite for three years.

That’s good news for The University of Montana’s Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, which crafted software for Terra and its sister satellite, Aqua.

"This means we can continue our work to monitor the Earth’s surface through this mission for several more years," said Steven Running, NTSG director and a UM professor. "We can still get a lot of new science out of this old hardware."

The $1.3 billion Terra satellite is an orbiting stethoscope that provides daily check-ups on the Earth’s health. It scans the entire planet every one to two days, homing in on details less than a kilometer wide. The size of a small bus and bundled with five primary instruments, the satellite was launched in December 1999.

Running’s group created software for Terra’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, which measures global vegetation, cloud characteristics, ocean temperature and more. The group has since used the satellite as its eye in the sky to study climate change, forest fires and other processes.

Running said the latest funding will extend the mission through 2009. Aqua, another NASA Earth Observing System satellite, was launched in 2002, and Running said that mission will be up for extension review in two years.

Besides continuing environmental monitoring work with Terra and Aqua, NTSG is creating software for NASA’s Hydrosphere State Mission, which will study the Earth’s freeze-thaw transition and soil moisture on a daily basis. The mission’s HYDROS satellite is tentatively set to launch in 2009.

More information about NASA environmental satellites and science can be found at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/.

http://news.umt.edu/index.asp?sec=1&too=100&eve=8&dat=7/18/2005&npa=842