The urgency of Earth science and climate studies took the spotlight Friday, Nov. 5, as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris visited NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Alongside NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, the vice president received a firsthand look at how NASA studies climate change and provides crucial information to understand our planet's changes and their impacts on our lives.
The vice president met with scientists and engineers to discuss:
• The first images captured by the Landsat 9 satellite, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that launched in late September to monitor the Earth's land surface.
• A new Earth science mission entitled Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) that will study the behavior of tropical storms and thunderstorms, including their impacts on weather and climate models.
• The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, which involves an instrument currently under construction at Goddard for a 2022 launch. PACE will extend and improve NASA's record of satellite observations of global ocean biology, aerosols (tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere), and clouds.
• The GOES-R program, whose GOES-T satellite is scheduled to launch for NOAA in February 2022 to improve weather forecasts.
Learn more about NASA's Earth science work at: https://climate.nasa.gov/
Video Producer: Rich Melnick
Video Editor: Mike Randazzo
