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This has been a long time in coming.

2
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You know, we're having this conversation
after 21, 22 years

3
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of thinking about this.

4
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Your eyes are burning and you smell it.

5
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If there’s dead fish around.

6
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Your day goes from being high

7
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aspirations and catching lots of fish
to well, we're not going fishing today.

8
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There's nothing to catch,
I don’t have bait.

9
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Can't get through the red tide.

10
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Everything's dead.

11
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Red tide is a nightmare.

12
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Red tide is a problem for fishermen.

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It's a problem for people with respiratory
issues that live on the beach.

14
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It's a problem for people that
go to the beach to get their zen time.

15
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Just problematic.

16
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The red tide when it's bad,
you just can't really get away from it.

17
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I mean and if the sea
and the oceans are dead.

18
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What are we going to eat?

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I've never been more excited

20
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about the possibility of discovery.

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I have 100% confidence

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that what we're going to produce from PACE
will surpass

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all of our wildest dreams.

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This is going to change the world.

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First red tide

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I remember was back in the mid 80s.

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Don't remember much
before that being all that bad.

28
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But in the 80s, there I was driving
test boats at the Mercury facility.

29
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And I was in a little slow boat,

30
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and the dead fish of all species

31
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were floating on top of the water. And,

32
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that was one of the first ones
and one of the worst ones I can remember.

33
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I remember

34
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just people complaining on the beach.

35
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No it's a bad deal.

36
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What we normally do is we
we run off shore and catch

37
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grouper
and snapper on a private boat that I run.

38
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clients would arrive between seven, 8:00.

39
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We run offshore, we fish all day,
try to get back to the dock by four

40
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because we aspire to have an outstanding
catch every day,

41
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which means spending time at the fish
cleaning table.

42
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So you get home exhausted.

43
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You're tired.

44
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It's. It's 12 hour day, no matter what.

45
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I mean, it's

46
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it's, it's a lot of work,
but it's very rewarding.

47
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Well, it's my life and it's everything.

48
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And we live in Florida.

49
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People come here to go on the water,
catch fish and enjoy the beaches.

50
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And that's not happening
when there's red tide and death

51
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all over the beach.

52
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We're lucky right now.

53
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We don't have the red tide,
but it runs people off.

54
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I would like to think
we could prevent red tide from happening,

55
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but that's almost

56
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like trying to keep cancer from happening.

57
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It's a tough one.

58
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You never know where it's going to pop up.

59
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I hope and pray that we can do

60
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something to turn us around here,
because it’s terrible,

61
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absolutely terrible.

62
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And, hopefully
NASA, can get something going

63
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there.

64
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The red tide can be so intense

65
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right along the beach that really
no one is on the beach.

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That's further magnified
if the red tide is also

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causing
low oxygen levels and caused, fish kills.

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And so when you have, 80 pound,

69
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120 pound grouper
or manatee, dead on the beach, rotting,

70
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you now have, biomass,
you have rotting animals.

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And that ammonia smell of rotting animals,

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and rotting mammals and fish on the beach.

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The combination can
truly make the beach just,

74
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not tolerable for anyone.

75
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Since I've worked here,
we had a period of about 18 months

76
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where red tide was on and off nonstop.

77
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It pretty much shut down the island.

78
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We had a large influx of patients.

79
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It was pretty much a daily occurrence.

80
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Somebody
calling with a respiratory problem.

81
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We have a hard time telling people

82
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to limit your exposure.

83
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So it isolated a lot of people
at that time.

84
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I think that the more data we have
and the more science,

85
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and the more funding we can direct
towards science to better understand

86
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red tide, then the more likely we are
to be able to mitigate and take steps

87
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to at least make some measurement
of improvement in controlling,

88
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predicting when it's going to be bad,
but also controlling just how bad it is

89
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and lessening the suffering not only of
us, but also of our marine friends.

90
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So you have to elevate your senses
all the way into space.

91
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So only from a satellite point of view
do you get this

92
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beautiful synoptic,
picture of our home planet.

93
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And if you weren't able to do that,
there would be so many parts

94
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of the role of phytoplankton
that just would otherwise be invisible.

95
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Most people don't realize this, but

96
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NASA plays a foundational role

97
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in the entire international study

98
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of Earth science.

99
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So I knew that

100
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I wanted to be involved in marine science,

101
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since eighth grade.

102
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And I was lucky enough at the time,
the public school that I attended in

103
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Central Connecticut had a program
that brought me

104
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to the biological station
for research in Bermuda.

105
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And that was a transformative moment.

106
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And it's not just learning
how the satellite system

107
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relates to the oceanography
I was already interested in, but,

108
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good grief,

109
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I mean, the greatest collection of Earth
scientists in the country reside here.

110
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Well, all right, so the ocean

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provides it,
you know, provides a food source.

112
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It helps regulate weather and climate.

113
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There are compounds from the ocean
that make medicines and jobs economy.

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All of that ties back to
what is in the ocean.

115
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And so from a phytoplankton point of view,
you have the beneficial ones

116
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that feed fisheries, the beneficial ones
that are moving carbon around

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and influencing climate.

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There are also the harmful ones.

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Some of these are harmful enough
that these phytoplankton could kill you

120
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and they're the ones that form red tides,

121
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where you're seeing beach closures
or oyster farms

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suddenly having to be closed
because of contamination.

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They carry this particular chemical
that tends to be an irritant

124
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to humans and animals
or create an odor and so forth.

125
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It's not enough just to say I see
phytoplankton there.

126
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You know, if you're sitting on the West
Florida shelf, for example,

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and you see a bloom of phytoplankton
from space, it's important to know

128
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whether it's a red tide
that might have some severe impact to that

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coastal community, versus it just happens
to be a lot of phytoplankton

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there.

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Some of these form

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in places like the, the Great Lakes.

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And there was an instance not long ago
where a cyanotoxin bloom,

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shut down the water
intake to the city of Toledo.

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And this is happening on more diverse

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areas, places
where they weren't happening before.

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Sometimes they're happening
with more frequency.

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Anyway.

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Point is, is that we want to monitor them,

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and that's where PACE comes in.

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We have been doing ocean

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color from space and atmospheric work
from space for over 40 years.

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And we have this beautiful fleet at NASA
and with our international partners,

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that really have formed the foundation
for what

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PACE Observatory is going to be. And

146
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they're wonderful at

147
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doing their job,
which was or is to separate

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a signal from phytoplankton
from everything else in the water column.

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But what they don't do well is

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tell you what is contributing

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to that biomass,
what community is actually there.

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And that's because, they use ocean color,
but they're only looking at 7

153
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or 8 colors of the rainbow.

154
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And they do that by having measurements
of several blue bands,

155
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several green bands,
and several red bands.

156
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But that's still eight
crayons in your box.

157
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If you wanted to actually see
the subtleties

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and different greens and different blues,
you need more color.

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PACE is full spectrum, full rainbow
from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared.

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So you would imagine this as being handed
a box of 200 crayons.

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And if I asked you to paint, sorry, color
the most spectacular landscape

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you could, which box are you gonna choose?

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You want all the color,
you don’t want some of the colors.

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So the
information content for any singular

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instrument on PACE is way
more than we're used to.

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This is such a cool problem to have.

167
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So suddenly the tools you have at
your fingertips

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will fill in all the gaps of color
that we could possibly want.

169
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We know the atmosphere is changing

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every time
a pattern in agriculture changes,

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you know, is there something that's
altering nutrient availability

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to your local marine ecosystem that is
suddenly changing how things are growing?

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You may be noticing in your backyard
if you have a small body of water,

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why are these scums of algae forming
that weren't there a few years ago?

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And then they disappear
and the timings are changing.

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We know carbon dioxide levels

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have increased over the past 200 years.

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We know that has warmed our atmosphere.

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A warming atmosphere,

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the physics behind it are starting
to change how our oceans behave.

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Circulation patterns are changing.

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Places are warmer than they used to be.

183
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Currents are evolving

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to bring nutrients to places
they once were not.

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In many ways, you know you
you wish you would have had these eyes

186
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in the sky forever because you know
that information is so powerful.

187
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So there's a lot of benefit
from an instrument like OCI,

188
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where you can reveal phytoplankton
features and algae features

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that you just can't see with
the instruments that we have in orbit now.

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It is going to provide
really a quantum leap

191
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in the knowledge base

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that we have, it's going to change
our foundational knowledge of things.

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And we are going to stumble
into new discoveries

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that, you know, I can't predict.

195
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The economy is tied to it

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now, not just coastal economies, but
it's easy to think of it in a coastal way.

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You know that there are fishermen,

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there are shell fishermen,
there's recreation associated with this.

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So if you enjoy, you know, eating

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or you enjoy going to the beach
or being out on the water, phytoplankton

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play a big role in your life,
whether you know it or not.

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So the scientific community, which is
inclusive of partners like NOAA, the U.S.

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Environmental Protection Agency

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00:13:59,505 --> 00:14:02,508
and other organizations like that
that do watershed management

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or have some responsibility
for safe and clean drinking water.

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00:14:06,554 --> 00:14:10,182
They spend a lot of time
thinking about, the frequency,

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the duration and the extent
of these harmful algal blooms.

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00:14:15,354 --> 00:14:17,857
and I've been involved in a project,
actually, that's really fascinating

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about using satellite data

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as a tool to start looking at longer
term time series of these.

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So I don't know that
anybody was specifically predicting a boom

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00:14:28,409 --> 00:14:32,621
or bust of them over time,
but they certainly are important enough,

213
00:14:32,621 --> 00:14:35,958
and resources to monitor
them are scarce enough

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that using satellite information
to start studying harmful

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00:14:40,087 --> 00:14:44,049
algal blooms has been really,
really, popular and,

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00:14:44,425 --> 00:14:47,887
becoming more of the forefront of
that field, at least from a

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management point of view over

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the past ten years or so.

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And so the real origin of the PACE mission

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is circa 1999

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2000,
where SeaWiFS was flying and successful.

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MODIS Terra had just launched.

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And at that point
the ocean color community

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had a whole new playbook
for their research.

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And those missions are so successful,
the scientific community

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really started diving into, well,
if we had to do this again,

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what happens now
and what does that look like?

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And that evolved into a series of studies
conducted at Goddard

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and elsewhere with collaborators
from all over the country.

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And the genesis of the idea

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became a little bit more real.

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It would be so profound

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to have a new ability
to look at this blue marble.

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You know, we're all citizens of Earth.

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Why don't we want to be watching
it every day from space?

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Now we are

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10.5 hours from launch.

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The deeper dive
we take into the relationships

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between land, ocean, and atmosphere,
the more realize we don't know

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and we need to learn.

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It's going to revolutionize
and allow us to take

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this huge volume of information
that we've never had before.

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And actually dissect it and integrate it
in really, really interesting ways.

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00:17:44,855 --> 00:17:46,523
We're going to start learning

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causes and effects or just interactions,

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00:17:50,444 --> 00:17:53,530
and how different parts of the ecosystem
start piecing

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00:17:53,530 --> 00:17:56,533
together.

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00:17:59,328 --> 00:18:00,829
So I can say

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00:18:00,829 --> 00:18:06,460
without hesitation that the new data
coming out of PACE from all three of its

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00:18:06,460 --> 00:18:11,215
instruments is going to absolutely change
the way we view our home planet.

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And what will come with that is a deeper
understanding of how all the systems

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connect, why things are happening,
why decisions we might make

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00:18:21,391 --> 00:18:23,769
could influence other things downstream

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in the grand sense
of how everything fits together.

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00:18:58,512 --> 00:19:00,055
Ten. Nine.

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00:19:00,055 --> 00:19:02,975
Eight. Seven. Six.

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00:19:02,975 --> 00:19:05,018
Five. Four.

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00:19:05,018 --> 00:19:07,771
Three. Two. One.

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00:19:07,771 --> 00:19:10,023
Booster ignition.

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00:19:10,023 --> 00:19:13,360
Full power
engines and liftoff of the Falcon

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00:19:13,360 --> 00:19:16,363
Nine and PACE.

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00:19:50,772 --> 00:19:53,775
1.7 billion pounds of thrust.

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00:20:08,373 --> 00:20:11,376
Come on girl!

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00:20:42,366 --> 00:20:43,825
Looking inside.

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00:20:43,825 --> 00:20:49,748
There go the fairings.