The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission took a big step toward launch this week when a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California shipped the scientific heart of the satellite to France. A U.S. Air Force C-17 airplane carrying the hardware – which includes finely tuned research instruments – left March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, California, on June 27. It arrived today, June 30, at a Thales Alenia Space clean room facility near Cannes, France, where engineers and technicians will spend the next year integrating the hardware with the rest of the satellite.
“Sunday was a long day under very hot conditions, but the team did a great job packing the hardware into the plane. Now that the payload is in France, we’re a major step closer to finishing this satellite and getting to launch,” said Parag Vaze, SWOT project manager at JPL.
SWOT is a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatial (CNES), with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA). The SUV-size spacecraft will make global surveys of Earth’s surface water. By measuring its height, researchers can track the volume and location of the finite resource around the world. The data will help with monitoring changes in flood plains and wetlands, measure how much fresh water flows into and out of lakes and rivers and back to the ocean, and track regional shifts in sea level.
Read More: NASA
Teams from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, California, loaded the scientific payload for the SWOT Earth-observing satellite into a C-17 airplane on June 27. The hardware is headed to a clean room facility near Cannes, France. (Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)