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SeaHawk/HawkEye Cubesat Begins Operations
Posted on Thursday, July 29, 2021 at 14:45:00To climb steep hills requires slow pace at first. - Shakespeare from Henry VIII.
This summer, the SeaHawk Cubesat, which carries the HawkEye ocean color instrument, entered routine operations on June 21, 2021.
The breakthrough came after two years of challenging efforts and unforeseen hurdles, according to researchers on the project.
The mission aims to enhance the ability to observe changes in ocean color through the use of high-resolution ocean color instruments. HawkEye was optimized to provide high quality imagery of the open ocean, coastal zones, lakes, estuaries and land features.
The study of ocean color helps scientists gain a better understanding of phytoplankton and their impact on the Earth system. These small organisms can affect a system on a very large scale such as climate change. More here
Below is a small set of HawkEye true color images that have been collected since its launch in 2018.
The SeaHawk CubeSat mission, which launched in 2018, is a partnership between NASA and the University of North Carolina, Wilmington (UNCW), Cloudland Instruments and AAC-Clyde Space and is funded by the Moore Foundation under a grant for the Sustained Ocean Color Observations with Nanosatellites (SOCON).
NASA provides services for the collection, processing, calibration, validation, archive and distribution of the data. For more imagery, visit NASA's Ocean Color Image Gallery.
