Studying the 'colours' of the sea from space and mapping its invisible inhabitants, the phytoplankton: Pace, the important new mission, left this morning, at 7.33am Italian time, from the Cape Canaveral base in Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket of NASA, worth 1 billion dollars, for monitoring the oceans, atmosphere and climate.
“What excites me most is that Pace will so profoundly improve our understanding of how our oceans work and how they are connected to the larger Earth system,” Karen St. Germain, director of the Science Division of Pace, said shortly before the launch. NASA Earth.
“Pace – she added – will show us the biology of the oceans on a scale we have never been able to see before”.
Acronym for Plankton, Aerosol, Climate, ocean Ecosystem, Pace is one of the most important space missions to study the Earth to have ever been launched: on board it has 3 instruments, two polarimeters to analyze in particular all the particles found in the atmosphere, and a spectrometer capable of observing the interaction of sunlight - in a spectrum of 'colours' ranging from near infrared to ultraviolet - with everything present in water, in particular it will be able to map plankton and recognize the various types.
Fundamental data that can be used by the entire global scientific community will in fact be released openly, to understand the transformations taking place on our planet with a level of detail that was previously impossible.
The microscopic plankton, invisible to the naked eye, plays a key role in the global carbon cycle by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into organic material which is the basis of food chains.
Peace is a troubled mission, born in 2014, which has seen several attempts to cancel it during the Trump administration and increased costs up to 948 million dollars.
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