After a decade of construction, NASA's water-monitoring probe is ready for launch in Dec

A new spacecraft built for a collaborative US-France mission is nearing its launch this December after over a decade-long phase of designing, building, and assembling.  Named SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission), it has been jointly developed by NASA, the French Space Agency (CNES), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency.

Currently at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the SWOT spacecraft has passed the final developmental stages after being subjected to rigorous tests. It will be launched from the Vanderberg Space Force Station in Florida, although the exact date is yet to be revealed. 

What is the SWOT mission about?

The SWOT mission's objective is to help scientists find out how much water is in the Earth’s lakes, rivers, and oceans and how the quantities change over time. Since water is a limited resource, researchers will measure the height of Earth’s water and track their volume and location. 

The data gathered from this mission, according to NASA, will help to monitor changes in floodplains and wetlands by measuring the amount of water that flows in and out of the rivers and lakes and the volume of water that goes into the oceans. It will also prove helpful for real-time marine operations affected by tides, currents, storm surge, sediment transport, and water quality issues by providing information on small-scale ocean currents. Gathering global observational evidence of how circular currents, called eddies, contribute to energy and heat storage changes in the ocean is also one of the objectives. 

(The SWOT spacecraft; Image: NASA/JPL)

As big as an SUV in size, the spacecraft has antennas that stick out about 16 feet (5 meters) on either side allowing it to cover 50 kilometers of the surface on both of its sides. So far, the spacecraft has been subjected to some intense testing as it has been shaken vigorously and bombarded with loud noises to test its limitation for a rocket launch, it has been frozen and baked as preparations for temperature fluctuations and irradiated in a vacuum chamber that simulates radiation levels in outer space. A few finals checks before it is stuffed inside a rocket is all that is left, says NASA. 

JPL Project Manager Parag Vaze revealed that the spacecraft will collect data 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the scientists will downlink about a terabyte of data every day. Its construction began around 2010 and hundreds of engineers and scientists from across the US and Europe have contributed to its development.