Rob Baltrum: Ok, so we are herein the clean room at Ball Aerospace looking at the NPP spacecraft. What you are looking at is the Nadir deck, essentially, the instrument or the Earth-facing deck, where all the instruments and theEarth-facing antennas are located.
Every orbit, we collect an orbit's worth of data for about a 101 minutes and we fly over Svalbard, Norway. We downlink the data.
The large instrument here you see basically at the front is the VIIRS instrument.That does the visible Infrared Radiometer Suite. VIIRS is the visible instrument collecting visible event data.
The next instrument, which is currently under a bag and being purged for cleanliness reasons is the CrIS instrument.That's the Cross-track Infrared Sounder.
Just behind that is the ATMS microwave sounder and those two instruments are primarily the weather data-collecting instruments. The instrument just above ATMS, that's theCERES instrument and basically it does Earth radiation budget measurements, it's a continuing data measurement.
And then the instrument that Jim is looking at right now now is the OMPS sensors. Two sensors, nadir sensor and then a limb sensor. That does ozone measurements.
So,those are the 5 instruments that make up the instrument suite on the NPP mission.
The other side is basically looking out at deep space, away from the Earth. That's where all of the spacecraft components are located. The batteries, the electronic boxes, our altitude sensors are all located on that deck.The spacecraft is just a big host for the science instruments because at the end of the day the mission is get the science data.
Energetic music. Energetic music. Music fades out. Music fades out. Beeping. Beeping. Beeping fades out.