Instruments

I don't know the exact number because the team is very large. I would say on the Instrument Team, we probably have roughly 200 people working on OCI. And then, on the Spacecraft Team, with all of the different spacecraft subsystems, we probably have another 100 or 150 all told working on it. And that's just the folks at Goddard Space Flight Center. In addition to the folks who are working here at NASA Goddard, we also have industry partners and university partners all across the country and all across the globe who are supplying different components and different instruments for the PACE mission. So, it does take a lot of people to make a space mission like this come together and it's really the combined efforts and craftsmanship of many people across the whole world to make this happen.

Dr. Gary Davis, PACE Mission Systems Engineer, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Beyond Blue: Why Ocean Color Really Matters (30-Apr-19).

Oh, that's a great question. There are many tests we want to do. The first type of tests are called performance testing. These tests make sure the instrument can gather the right amount of data, with the right calibration and the error bands that we want. So, one way we do that is we use a laser. We have a system called GLAMR (Goddard Laser for Absolute Measure of Radiance) that is a tunable laser and that allows us to tune the wavelength of light that goes into the instrument. This makes us sure that the instrument can measure those particular wavelengths. So we use those types of performance tests to make sure the instrument can collect the light that we want. So that's one type of testing.

Another type of testing we do is to make sure that the instrument can survive the rigors of launch and the space environment. So for those types of tests we will do a vibration test where we shake the instrument to make sure it stays together and doesn't fall apart during launch. We will also do thermal tests where we make the instrument very hot and then very cold and very hot and very cold to simulate the space environment as we orbit the earth to make sure it can survive.

So, in a nutshell, there are many tests I could go into, but we do performance tests and environmental tests.

Dr. Gary Davis, PACE Mission Systems Engineer, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Beyond Blue: Why Ocean Color Really Matters (30-Apr-19).

Yes, we do look at inland water bodies so long as those water bodies are big enough that the satellite footprint (1 km² or 0.4 mi²) is only looking at water vs. a mixture of water and land. And I think off the top of my head there are on the order of 150 to 200 lakes inside of the continental United States that are resolvable from an instrument like PACE.

Dr. Jeremy Werdell, PACE Project Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Beyond Blue: Why Ocean Color Really Matters (30-Apr-19).

Yes. The NASA data we are providing are free and open to the public (generally non-commercial use) but we would love to see these data. It would be incredibly rewarding to see these data used in the classroom. And beyond that, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center also provides software and visualization tools that are open source to the public that will aid in using these data intuitively. [They are] easy so the learning curve for bringing this into the classroom should be super seamless. The data will be available in one place and the software are available in the exact same place. And thank you in advance for using it in your classroom - that's fantastic!

Dr. Jeremy Werdell, PACE Project Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Beyond Blue: Why Ocean Color Really Matters (09-Apr-21).