ISS-RapidScat Instrument: A New Measure of Ocean Winds

Mission scientists and engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory describe how their small team, on a tight budget and short deadline, created the ISS-RapidScat instrument to gather high-priority measurements of ocean winds from a berth on the International Space Station. The ISS-RapidScat instrument is a replacement for NASA's QuikScat Earth satellite, which monitored ocean winds to provide essential measurements used in weather predictions, including hurricane monitoring. When the satellite stopped collecting wind data in late 2009, NASA was challenged to quickly and cost-effectively conceive of a replacement. JPL came up with a solution that uses the framework of the ISS and reuses hardware originally built to test parts of QuikScat to create an instrument for a fraction of the cost and time it would take to build and launch a new satellite. The resulting ISS-RapidScat instrument is aboard the International Space Station and will measure Earth's ocean surface wind speed and direction.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] seeing things like a hurricane develop in its earliest phases getting a much better idea of its strength than we can from flying one or two planes through it we can map the entire surface effect of a tropical storm in one [Music] pass the ISS rapid scat is a mission to bring a payload to the International

00:00:35 Space Station and from there we will observe uh the Earth's oceans and be able to map the speed and direction of Winds near the surface rapid scat is a scatterometer it's a radar it sends out little bits of energy towards Earth's surface that then get reflected back if the ocean is flat most of that energy from the radar just scatters away the stronger the wind the rougher the

00:00:56 surface will be the more energy will be returned to the radar and then we can convert that energy into a measurement of the wind and that'll help us do things like track and predict severe storms and also learn about the ocean atmospheric interface especially over the tropical regions which are of great interest to the United States because most of the tropical hurricanes that hit

00:01:17 the United States come from those regions we're launching uh on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket the Dragon capsule separates from the Falcon 9 in orbit and after orbiting Earth a couple of times the International Space Station robotic arm reaches out and gently grabs the dragon as the dragon you know slowly approaches the ISS about 2 Days Later ground controllers bring the robot arm

00:01:48 over the robotic arm then reaches into the trunk and grabs the instrument and plugs that onto the International Space Station and everything mates robotically we hook these pieces together and then we get to stay on the outside of at the space station for a couple of [Music] years the space station came and asked what relatively inexpensive payloads we

00:02:11 could put up on the space station we had this Hardware sitting there doing nothing collecting dust for the last 13 years we might as well try to put it to use what if we took some of the existing hardware and tried to fly it in the simplest way possible we've put them through extensive testing electrically tested them vibration tables thermal vacuum Chambers and that left over

00:02:30 Hardware meant that we had to save about 80% of the cost in terms of being able to reuse the hardware instead of building new and we've added the necessary adjustments needed for this new orbiting platform that will'll be on the space station is built out we know what the external capabilities are we know we can put science instruments in different places we're taking something

00:02:49 with a very small team a very small budget and a very short schedule and turning it into something with very real science value the global coverage of the earth is probably right now one one of the the greatest priorities that people should have in mind when they think about the importance of the Space Program the Earth is a very Dynamic very complex

00:03:09 system and because of the role that winds play it's a fundamental part of that whole story and we need people's awareness and understanding of the importance of NASA's mission to help understand how it climate is [Music] changing