Vanderlei Martins, a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, was flying across the Pacific Ocean a few years ago when he looked out the window and decided to photograph the bright white clouds floating by. On a whim, he took out a polarizer, similar to a sunglasses lens, and rotated it in front of his camera as he snapped photos. The result? “I saw rainbows in the clouds,” Martins said.
This dynamic view of clouds sparked an idea for a tiny satellite that will launch on Nov. 2 from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, to the International Space Station. From there it will be released into Earth orbit.
This NASA-funded CubeSat will collect vital information about clouds and aerosols, tiny particles in the atmosphere that can act as nuclei on which cloud droplets and ice particles form. These measurements will help us better understand how aerosol particles impact weather, climate and air quality.
The Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (HARP) CubeSat is about the size of a hearty loaf of bread. It will be the first attempt to put a polarimeter, which measures the polarization of light, aboard a CubeSat. HARP could pave the way for future NASA missions involving a constellation of little satellites peering down at clouds and aerosols, Martins said. NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office is funding HARP under the In-Space Validation of Earth Science Technologies program. Martin in the principal investigator of the mission.
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Image via NASA/SDL/UMBC