In the morning hours of December 3, off the coast of Santa Barbara County, a SpaceX Falcon 9 (the recent NASA-certified rocket approved for carrying the agency’s most critical scientific cargoes) launched carrying a unique cargo. The Falcon 9 took flight from Vandenburg Air Force Base with 64 small satellites on board from government, universities and startups that will focus on technology demonstrations for scientific research.
One of the satellites aboard, called SeaHawk-1, has a unique and specific purpose – to monitor the changing colors of our ocean. SeaHawk is 10x30cm, or about the size of a toaster, and is equipped with a powerful color-sensing technology that will take images of the ocean, along with other bodies of water such as large lakes, rivers, estuaries and other near-shore environments, where pollutants are often most acute and where there are safety and commercial considerations.
Monitoring ocean color tells us the health and chemistry of the ocean.
For example, phytoplankton, which form the base of the oceanic food web, use sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen we breathe and energy the phytoplanckton use (a process called photosynthesis). This is possible because plants contain chlorophyll, a green-colored compound which traps the energy from sunlight. Because different types of phytoplankton have different concentrations of chlorophyll, measuring the color of an area of the ocean allows us to estimate the amount and general type of phytoplankton in that area.
The distribution of plants in the ocean also tells us where nutrient levels are high, and shows where pollutants poison the ocean and prevent plant growth. Since phytoplankton depend upon specific conditions for growth, they frequently become the first indicator of a change in their environment, which can be helpful in alerting researchers, fisherman and communities of harmful algal blooms to potential fishing zones.
High-resolution at a lower cost
SeaHawk is also unique because it has significantly higher spatial resolution than standard satellite systems used to monitor ocean color currently - 10 times higher resolution than the current operating NASA ocean-color satellite. And, the pint-sized satellite is considerably less expensive to construct. While NASA has built extremely capable satellites for ocean imaging, they can cost billions of dollars, while cubesats like SeaHawk have budgets 200 times smaller. The vision for SeaHawk came from a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, led by John M. Morrison. With foundation funding of $2.4 million, the team designed, developed and deployed the cubesat in partnership with NASA.
With a successful launch, there is now evidence that autonomous nanosatellites can be built quickly, less expensively and put into space to capture important scientific information. SeaHawk is scheduled to be in space for the next year, sending images down to Earth every day. The data collected will be made available to the public at no cost. The team at University of North Carolina Wilmington and its partners have a second nanosatellite in development and currently is scheduled for a mission towards the end of 2019.
Message sent
Thank you for sharing.