NASA’s PACE spacecraft launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 1:33 a.m. EST Thursday, February 8. Credit: NASA Television’s PACE spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 1:33 a.m.Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud ocean Ecosystem
For atmospheric scientists, the path to PACE also traces back across decades. In the late 1970s, the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer provided some of the first looks at aerosol optical depth, a measure of how much dust and particles were floating in our skies. Later scientists began measuring such particles daily and around the world with the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer and MODIS instruments on Terra.
By 2012, NASA scientists and engineers were starting to sketch out rough ideas for PACE, and the wider science community dug into the details in 2014. By 2015, NASA Goddard started hiring for a new mission—including Jeremy Werdell—and by 2016, the agency had announced the formal development of a PACE mission.—and this week’s launch there have been thousands of hours of work by hundreds of people…including many monthsNASA’s PACE spacecraft in orbit over Earth.