Final Approach

Narration: LK Ward

Transcript:

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So, my heart is definitely racing. I don’t know about anyone else’s.

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This is the stuff nerds dream of.

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Ten seconds

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Nine

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Eight

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Seven

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Six

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- It’s gonna happen!-

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Four

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Three

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Two

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NASA Explorers

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Cryosphere

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Episode Nine: Final Approach

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That countdown you just heard?

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We’ll get back to that in a minute.

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Last episode, we saw the epic launch of ICESat-2, NASA’s newest state-of-the-art ice-observing satellite.

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But now that it’s in orbit, the pressure to deliver results in on.

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Between launch and the first ground returns, it took seventeen or eighteen days or something like this.

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You know, it’s a time when you’re quite nervous.

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Nine years ago, Dr. Thorsten Markus took over as the Lead Project Scientist

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for ICESat-2 during a time when the mission needed a champion.

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You start fighting for a mission, for over - for nine years now.

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So, when ICESat-2 was turned on for the first time, eighteen days after it was launched,

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only then would the science team know if the whole thing had worked. And it did

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First of all, it’s kind of emotional being here.

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ICESat-2 was in development for nine, ten years

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and, you know, as a project scientist, you live a mission, right?

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If it sounds like there’s a lot of noise in the background,

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that’s because Thorsten is being interviewed from a plane 1,500 feet in the air.

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IceBridge was tasked with the job of bridging the data between the end of ICESat’s mission

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and the beginning of ICESat-2 – about a nine-year difference.

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The goal is that it would run until ICESat-2 launched, and then have overlap with ICESat-2 as well

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so we can get a really long, well calibrated time series from IceBridge.

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As the Deputy Project Scientist for Operation IceBridge,

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Brooke works closely with Thorsten to make sure the two missions are syncing up.

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The timing was everything during that mission, which was a real challenge, because not only….

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Basically, what you need to take away is getting an airplane and a satellite in space

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to fly over the same flight path at the same time and collect matching data is really, really hard

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IceBridge was tasked with two objectives:

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Check the accuracy of ICESat-2’s data over land ice and over sea ice.

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They were able to lock in the land ice data fairly early in the mission. But the sea ice data…

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It was really tricky. We waited day after day.

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Do we fly the sea ice? It’s still on our list.

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Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Mark on the overpass! Zero four three five three five zulu.

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Here’s what just happened:

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A plane 1,500 feet up and a satellite 308 miles up measured the same sea ice at the same time

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This moment finally linked veteran mission Operation IceBridge’s data to that of its new sister mission, ICESat-2

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- two projects that, until now, were separate for nearly ten years.

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It’s a very satisfying feeling, because you do something that is meaningful in the bigger picture.

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And yeah, that’s very satisfying.

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Our search for knowledge doesn’t end here.

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GRACE-FO and ICESat-2, the two satellite missions that launched this year,

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will continue to bring in incredible data for the foreseeable future.

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The steady drumbeat of campaigns in the field goes on.

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But most of all, the people who look for answers will never stop searching.

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And from our perspective, it’s pretty clear why:

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What is your favorite planet in the solar system?

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My favorite planet is Earth.

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What? Earth…Really?

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The Earth! Obviously.

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My favorite planet in the solar system?

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Earth! Right? We live on it. It’s a really important one.

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My favorite planet is Earth!

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Yeah, so -

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Why?

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When you look out at the other planets, they’re absolutely fascinating.

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They’ve got all sorts of interesting systems going on. They’ve got dust storms.

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But then when you’re on another planet looking back at Earth, I mean, it’s just incredible.

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Whenever you go in different places, it looks so different, so amazing, it’s just…I love the planet Earth.

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It’s just a very special planet. This is our home.

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We’ve seen things far beyond the solar system.

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But even with all that, even with the amazing things we’ve seen, one of the most amazing is the Earth itself.

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It’s gotta be Earth.

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It’s gotta be Earth.

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It’s gotta be here. I like the polar regions of here.

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Of Earth. Yeah, sorry. It’s very boring.

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Earth is good.

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Earth is good.

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We live here. It sustains our life.

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I’m not going to turn my back on it.

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[Laughing]

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It’s got water, it’s got ice, it’s got vegetation.

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I mean it’s just, it’s rich with life. And so studying Earth is a very, very rewarding career.

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And I think if we were on any other planet, we’d be trying to get to Earth as quickly as we could.

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Cryosphere

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