CYGNSS Satellite System Will Enable Unprecedented Insights into Storm Formation

In chambers that mimic space, University of Michigan engineers are testing a prototype of NASA's CYGNSS satellite system, which will enable groundbreaking insights into the formation and evolution of hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones around the globe. The system is expected to launch in October, 2016 and the university researchers are working on the mission under a contract with NASA. By using a constellation configuration of eight satellites, CYGNSS will be capable of providing new images of ongoing hurricanes every 12 minutes, as opposed to the once-per-day measurement current satellites provide.

Transcript

00:00:00 Typical weather satellites are about the size about a van or small bus that size and the CYGNSS satellite is comparable to a typical microwave oven in your kitchen there's eight satellites and they're all deployed in a single up plain equally spread all the way around the earth and the reason they're so small compared to typical weather satellites because at the technique that they used to measure the winds though the science instrument on our satellites is really just a modified GPS receiver just similar to the kind that's in your cell phone CYGNSS is a nasa satellite mission that

00:00:31 consistent eight satellites they're gonna be in orbit arm around the tropics it's scheduled to launch in October 2016 the instruments are designed to measure the speed of the wind near the ocean surface in the middle of hurricanes singers make measurements in a fundamentally different way than historical weather satellites have made them every 12 minutes a new satellite comes across and when they're crossing over a a hurricane that means that we get new measurements have the winds every 12

00:01:00 minutes and that's a huge improvement over traditional weather satellites where there's one satellite and they typically come back around about once every day or two that rapid refresh in the imagery of the winds is at a key element why we're gonna be able to improve the hurricane forecast we have several roles the science role is where the lead institution taking the raw data and turning into estimates that the winds at the ocean surface and the roughness at the ocean surface

00:01:26 confirm that you can estimate the amount of energy that comes off the ocean into the hurricane for the engineering the lead institution is an organization in Texas called Southwest Research Institute and we're a subcontractor to them for some of the engineering because we're building eight satellites at the same time starting next year this year we're building detail prototypes of the satellites to test on all the different details about the design in particular theres two parts of it that we need to test one of them is the

00:01:57 structural integrity to make sure that it survives the the environment during the launch so we build this mechanical model as realistically as possible and then and put it on a vibration table and shake it and likewise in the thermal environment you need to design the cooling systems and heating system much differently backing do on the ground so we have again a computer model and how the heat will flow and then we put the thermal model into a vacuum chamber and test the instrument in the vacuum in to see if it behaves the way the model

00:02:28 predicts in software once the model is validated you can then predict what the thermal environment will be and how hot or cold the satellite will run a good example of what sickness can potentially do for hurricane forecasting in the future is by looking back at what happened with hurricane sandy so hurricane sandy was a very large hurricane made landfall just south of New York City and because it was heading towards a major population center and also because it was so close to the US there is an unusually large number of hurricane hunter airplanes

00:03:00 that were flown over our forecast for both the strength of the hurricane and where it made landfall and what the swell was which is actually the biggest source of damage with hurricanes all those things were extremely well forecast CYGNSS the type of measurements that it makes are very very similar to the measurements made by the hurricane hunter airplanes it makes measurements cutting through the hurricane very often having CYGNSS on orbit will be like having a fleet of hurricane hunter airplanes distributed everywhere in the tropics we're hoping to get the type of improvement and

00:03:30 forecast skill that we got with Sandy except we'll get it everywhere which is stuck on the side and gets deploying that's much smaller the orbiter is in the vicinity the comment for a couple years but near the beginning at the mission when the comment is still far away from the Sun the ER the orbiter what