New NASA Mission to Detect Plant Water Use from Space
Doctors learn a lot about their patients' health by taking their temperature. An elevated temperature, or fever, can be a sign of illness. The same goes for plants, but their temperatures on a global scale are harder to measure than the temperatures of individual people.
That's about to change, thanks to a new NASA instrument that soon will be installed on the International Space Station called ECOSTRESS, or ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station. ECOSTRESS will measure the temperature of plants from space. This will enable researchers to determine plant water use and to study how drought conditions affect plant health.
[...] ECOSTRESS will hitch a ride to the space station on a NASA-contracted, SpaceX cargo resupply mission scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on June 29. Once it arrives, it will be robotically installed on the exterior of the station's Japanese Experiment Module Exposed Facility Unit.
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[Update (06:00 EDT / 10:00 UTC): Launch was a success. Dragon module separated cleanly and is on route to the ISS.]
CRS-15 Mission Overview (PDF)
SpaceX is targeting Friday, June 29 for an instantaneous launch of its fifteenth Commercial Resupply Services mission (CRS-15) at 5:42 a.m. EDT, or 9:42 UTC, from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. Dragon will separate from Falcon 9's second stage about nine minutes and thirty seconds after liftoff and attach to the space station on Monday, July 2. An instantaneous backup launch opportunity is available on Sunday, July 1 at 4:54 a.m. EDT, or 8:54 UTC.
Both Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft for the CRS-15 mission are flight-proven. Falcon 9's first stage previously supported the TESS mission in April 2018, and Dragon previously supported the CRS-9 mission in July 2016. SpaceX will not attempt to recover Falcon 9's first stage after launch.
Follow along on the YouTube Live Stream.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Wednesday June 20 2018, @11:18PM
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/whats-that-blue-thing-doing-here/ [raspberrypi.org]
https://www.flickr.com/photos/14397636@N07/sets/72157636223976374/with/10105626233/ [flickr.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by aristarchus on Thursday June 21 2018, @06:02AM
Only commenting here because of the dearth of actual comments on scientific articles, and to point out that jmorris is an anti-scientific ass, and we could have had a much more scientific aristarchus submission, since, after all, he is a astrophyscist. On the other hand, studying the earth from space could really piss off a bunch of Petrochemical Arabs and associated corporations. Oh, my.