ECOSTRESS acquired this image on the night of July 9 over Egypt. Yellow and red indicate generally higher temperatures. The Nile is visible as a thin blue line on the main image. The black and white inset shows the level of detail available from ECOSTRESS, with the coolness of the Nile and the surrounding darker vegetation. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
A few days after its successful installation on the International Space Station, NASA's most recent Earth Observation Mission, the ECOSystem experiment on the Space Spatial Radiometer (ECOSTRESS) collected its first scientific data on the Earth's surface temperature.
ECOSTRESS will measure plant temperature from space, allowing researchers to determine the amount of aquatic plants used and to study how droughts affect plant health.
The instrument was launched on June 29 from the Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida. Freight replenishment mission. On July 5th, ground controllers at NASA 's Johnson Space Center in Houston extracted ECOSTRESS from the trunk and transferred it by robot to the station' s Japanese experience. Module-Exposed Facility (JEM-EF) and has it installed. After a few days of testing and startup, ECOSTRESS acquired its first image on July 9th.
"Often, satellite missions require weeks or months to produce quality data that we already receive from ECOSTRESS" the principal investigator of the mission, Simon Hook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena , in California. ECOSTRESS is part of a new class of NASA scientific instruments at low cost and fast development. The ECOSTRESS instrument was launched less than four years after the start of the project
The ECOSTRESS team now checks the instrument and acquires preliminary scientific data, a process that should last about a month. They completed an initial calibration of the scientific data and now validate the data against similar measurements made at ground control sites. When this process is complete, ECOSTRESS will be ready to begin its one – year scientific mission.
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More information:
For more information on ECOSTRESS, visit: ecostress.jpl.nasa.gov
For more information on scientific activities aboard the Space Station, visit: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ sta … arch_by_com_campaign